Awake in the Infinite Cold
by quothme
Summary: Sometimes the fruit is forbidden for a reason. A mélange of Twilight and How to Be, with an Artward who so carefully and so softly sneaks under her skin and into her soul. Not your typical E/B romance. Complete.
1. Forbidden fruit

**Summary:** Sometimes we forget that the fruit is forbidden for a reason. A mysterious Good Samaritan saves Bella from a bus before bolting like his hair is on fire. A mélange of _Twilight_, the movie _How to Be_, and a short story that for now shall remain nameless (so as not to give too much of the plot away for these first couple of chapters). Because Artward breaks my heart. (AU)

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Twilight; it owns me. The title of this story is from the song "Only Hope" by Mandy Moore and/or Switchfoot, depending on how you roll.

**Note:** Many thanks to my PTB betas moonlightdreamer333 and CapriciousC for their incredible insight into this story and excellent eyes for detail. If you ever have the honor of getting either of them as your PTB beta, be very, very grateful.

* * *

But you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it, you will surely die.

Genesis 2:17

* * *

This was decidedly _not_ Forks.

The cramped streets sliced often and irregularly through what once had been green earth; the towers of steel and concrete rose to dominate the fog-veiled sky; and cars, bikes, and pedestrians swarmed like industrious ants through the city maze. There was so much to see, hear, and smell in the Emerald City that Bella found herself turning in a slow semi-circle at an intersection near the shoebox she now called home, her body a compass trying to find an elusive north.

When her sights at last settled on a city corridor that seemed commercial enough to harbor a grocery store, Bella stepped forward to join the ranks of faceless commuters waiting for a signal to stem the tide of vehicles bisecting their walking path.

She was a mere four hours from Forks, separated only by the Olympic National Park and a couple of narrow bodies of water, but she might as well have been in Switzerland. Bella had accompanied Charlie to Seattle once before, when he'd had the opportunity to attend a law enforcement conference in the city. In his down time between sessions, they'd played tourist by walking through Pike's market, going up the Space Needle, and riding the ducks. She'd snapped pictures of Charlie standing by a fish as long as his arm, of him outlined by the distinctive city skyline, and of him standing uncomfortably by the queerly shaped vehicles that later transported them seamlessly between land and sea.

But she now knew that spending a day in the sheltered tourist façade of Seattle was a far cry from calling its back streets home.

After she had closed her rusty front door on Charlie's retreating back, she had watched from her window as he climbed into his squad car and flicked the lights once, the brief shrill of the siren a warning to everyone on the street that his little girl lived here, and he'd be watching.

Then Charlie was gone, his face grim through the glass, and she was left standing in the middle of four white walls, clutching the bottle of pepper spray that he had pressed into her hand before giving her an awkward, one-armed hug.

With the departure of the marked vehicle, the foot traffic below her increased, the street's denizens emerging from nearby alleys and apartments. She watched from her window as an old lady pushed a rattling shopping cart full of crushed tin cans. The cart and its lady had clearly both seen better days.

Two weeks ago, this had all been a dream.

Two weeks ago, Charlie had thrown her a party to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. He stuck to the traditional guest list—Billy and Jacob—but purchased two extra six-packs in honor of the occasion.

Most college students would probably have been horrified at the thought of celebrating such an important milestone with authority figures nearby, but Bella insisted on a low-key night at home rather than the popular alternative of bar-hopping in Port Angeles. Charlie tossed Bella her first Rainier beer when the pizza arrived, and he pretended to believe her when she pretended to be unfamiliar with the taste of alcohol. Nobody mentioned the incident on Jacob's sixteenth birthday when he'd filched some Jack Daniels and returned a decidedly tipsy Bella to her father well after curfew.

They ate, drank, and talked into the wee hours of the morning, until Charlie gave Jacob an informal sobriety test and deemed him sobered up enough to brave the drive home.

As the Blacks lingered on the porch in an effort to prevent the evening from slipping away, Jacob touched two fingers to her cheek in a gesture of farewell. Although Bella saw him every day for the next two weeks, that night marked the end of another era—her life in Forks.

The other members of the Swan-Black pseudo-family had been shocked when she had announced that the University of Washington had accepted her into its Psychology Master's program and that she would start at its Seattle campus in a few short months. She hadn't told anyone—including Jacob—that she was applying because she hadn't thought that a small-town girl with a degree from Peninsula Community College would even be considered for a coveted UW graduate position, much less a desirable research assistant position.

Bella also hadn't told anyone because she was secretly afraid of how Jacob would react. After she had graduated from college with a nebulous degree in psychology and no immediate job prospects, Jacob began increasingly hinting at his plans for the future, which included opening a small garage and settling down with her in a cozy cabin on his ancestral lands. She had known of his dreams since they were little, but it took the possibility of actually having them become reality in the near future for her to realize that she had never seen herself in the ideal world he had created. She was too young to get married. She had never seen the world beyond Forks. And, although she would scarce admit it to herself at the time, she wanted to step out from under the life-long shadow of being nothing more than "Black's girlfriend."

As she'd feared, Jacob did not approve. She had placed her acceptance letter on the table along with a plate of his favorite dessert.

His initial response was denial. "But you're not going to go, right?" he'd scoffed with an all-knowing look in his eye.

She'd responded by stomping up the stairs to her room and slamming the door.

Jacob responded to her anger in kind, following her upstairs and opening the door immediately after she slammed it in his face.

"I didn't even know you were applying," he said. As his anger grew, so did the volume of his voice. "I can't believe you're considering doing this to me—to us! You were sneaking around behind my back…"

His little tirade continued until Charlie threw him out of the house. No one talked to his little girl in that tone of voice.

"Come back after you've cooled off," Charlie had called out as a red-faced Jake wrenched open the door of his truck so forcefully that the hinges squealed. "And drive safe."

Jacob was back the next morning for breakfast, and he remained a step behind Bella in the tiny kitchen as she prepared scrambled eggs and bacon for Charlie. This time, his tactic was bargaining. He tried things like "The University of Phoenix has a master's degree in psychology" and "Maybe I could look into getting my undergraduate degree at UW."

When Charlie came in, decked out in his crisp uniform, he didn't comment on Jake's unusually early presence. Instead, he sat and watched him constantly angling himself in Bella's way as she put the finishing touches on breakfast. Charlie listened silently to Jacob's pleas, never adding any of his own. When he finished eating and set his fork down with an emphatic plink, he unfolded himself from his chair and waited. His silent presence soon commanded their attention, and Charlie took advantage of the resulting spotlight, pointing two stiff fingers inward at his eyes and then rotating his wrist toward Jacob in the symbol for "I'll be watching." Then he was off to work, whistling as he went, leaving Bella to fend off a series of increasingly bizarre strategies that Jacob had apparently spent all night dreaming up.

When Bella refused to delay her college plans for a couple of years until Jacob had gotten his as-yet fictitious garage off the ground, he became depressed and stopped dropping by. Days melted into weeks, and Billy consistently told her that Jacob wasn't there each time she called. Each time, Billy said the words with a sigh, and Bella could almost see Jacob poking his head out of his room and frantically slashing at his throat with a grimace when he realized who was on the phone. Bella had seen Jacob use the same tactic when Leah Clearwater had taken to calling him all summer after their seventh grade year in a misguided yet surprisingly persistent attempt to make him her boyfriend.

That was the summer Bella and Jacob made their relationship official, partly in an attempt to get Leah off his back. Leah didn't speak to either of them again after Jacob finally took one of her calls and told her that he already had a girlfriend. Sometimes, Bella wondered if she and Jacob had fallen together out of nothing more than convenience. She loved him, but she had known him for so long that her love for him never made her heart race or her blood boil. Although his body and mind had matured, she still remembered him as the short, skinny boy with an odd fixation on bodily functions.

Bella was also painfully aware of his stubbornness. As her birthday party loomed, she was worried that Jacob would not have gotten over his funk and would be abandoning her to an evening on the couch in front of whatever sporting event was currently in season. Therefore, she was overjoyed to see two silhouettes in the front seat of Billy's truck as it pulled up. When Jacob eased Billy's wheel chair from around the back of the car, she saw acceptance in his eyes.

"You came," she said quietly, and he flashed his high-beam grin at her for the first time since she'd announced that she was going off to grad school.

"Of course I came," he said. "I wouldn't have missed your big day for the world. You're always a step ahead of me; sometimes I don't think I can keep up. "

They both knew he wasn't just talking about her age.

Bella had felt his dark eyes on her as they talked and laughed the twilight of her twentieth year away. She'd met his gaze firmly, her eyes continuously communicating, _I'm doing this_, and his responding with a sad, _I know_.

As Bella had stood with her father on the porch of her childhood home and watched her best friend drive away in his beat-up, two-toned Chevy, she felt an incongruous mixture of sadness and hope, fear and excitement, bitter and sweet. In two weeks, she would be starting a new life far from home.

In two weeks, she would be standing on a street corner, trying to act as sophisticated and bored as the people around her even though she felt about two inches tall. Leaving Charlie had been harder than she'd expected.

The sight of an antiquated electric bus rattling down the hill toward her intersection provided a welcome distraction from the look in Charlie's eye when he'd said goodbye. She remembered this public transportation option as yet another oddity from her brief jaunt in the city. The bus rumbled along the ground rail below it, the power lines above the street crackling with its passing.

As the bus slid closer, picking up speed coming down the hill that sloped toward the Puget sound, someone jostled Bella in the shoulder, likely the hotshot businessman talking animatedly to the air in front of him, a Bluetooth bug in his ear.

Everything happened at once.

The force of the unexpected contact upset Bella's already fragile balance, and she stumbled off the curb directly into the path of the oncoming vehicle. Brakes and power lines screamed in protest, but the bus was moving too quickly, was too heavy with passengers, and was too near.

In a moment of heightened clarity, Bella could see every pockmark and paint chip on the bus' front bumper. She could see the female driver's horrified expression, the tendons on her neck straining as she mashed on the foot brake. The instant before impact, Bella thought for the first time that maybe Jacob had been right. Maybe she never should have left Forks after all.

She'd never given much thought to how she would die, but this was not what she would choose. She was going to die on some nameless corner in an impersonal city surrounded by faceless strangers rather than her family, friends, and the dark, damp forests of home.

She could only close her eyes and fall.

But impact never came.

Instead, her hair snagged on something, like when she was little and she and Jacob were climbing recklessly through the trees in his backyard. The ground behind her rose up, slapping the air out of her lungs. She looked up with eyes stinging from the burning pinpricks in her scalp to see the bus wheeze to a stop in the middle of the intersection, directly above the patch of ground that only narrowly escaped being smeared with her guts.

The almost-accident ignited the little group of pedestrians who had been so staunchly ignoring each other but a few moments before. Now, they were comrades, shouting queries at each other and Bella and obscenities at the bus driver, who was venting her fear toward the group in a very vocal and vulgar fashion. They gathered around Bella, their necks craning to see if she were okay and to catch a glimpse of her savior.

"Are you alright?" asked the businessman, his face red with shame and worry.

Before Bella could answer, he barked, "No, not you" to whomever he was talking to on the phone, and then, for the person's benefit, started a lengthy explanation of the incident. Bella cringed at the inadvertent excitement in the man's voice as he recounted what had nearly happened. Because of the babble of voices, it was a few moments before she became aware that she wasn't alone on the sidewalk. Something—or, rather, some_one—_was cradling her head. As she shifted awkwardly at the realization, gentle hands helped her sit up. She turned to stare into the face of the person who had just saved her life.

It was a young man of indeterminable age. She didn't recognize him from the brief glance she'd spared on the other people waiting to cross the street. Even now, Bella registered little about his appearance except a white face and bronze hair falling into deep eyes that stared over her shoulder at the bus. She watched as his eyes shifted from a point behind her and focused on her face.

For a moment, Bella watched his lips tremble as though he were going to speak, but then his forehead creased, and he abruptly scrambled up from the sidewalk. The crowd scattered like bowling pins with the force of his departure, and he slunk away with his hands shoved in coat pockets, shoulders stiff, head down. His posture screamed shame and self-loathing, as though he regretted his actions.

As though he regretted saving her life.

She stared in his direction long after he disappeared around a corner. Then three pairs of hands extended to help her back to her feet, and one lady was kind enough to retrieve the tote that had slipped off her shoulder as she fell.

"I'm fine, thanks. Really, it's no big deal," she repeated in a monotone to everyone who would listen, backing up until she felt a solid brick wall between her shoulder blades.

Bella let the wall hold her up until the crowd dispersed, back to their routine, the event nothing more than a bit of excitement in their day that would lend itself well to water cooler discussions back at the office.

But Bella didn't have a routine to fall back on. She didn't know where she was going; she didn't know where home was any more. She didn't even have anyone to tell. Charlie would just worry about her even more. Jacob would say "I told you so" and would probably drive out here and try to bring her back to Forks whether she wanted to or not. So she stood alone on a street corner and tried to decide whether her desire to get away from prying eyes outweighed her need for food.

Eventually, with the thought of the brown bag of miscellaneous items that she'd scavenged from her kitchen at home—peanut butter, tuna fish, cans of soup—she convinced herself that she had enough to live on until later in the week. She'd Google the nearest grocery store rather than striking out on her own like a leaf in the wind.

As she turned back toward her apartment, she kicked something at her feet and looked down to see a small black wallet skittering across the concrete. It was even more lost and alone than she was.

Somehow, Bella knew it was _his_.

* * * * *


	2. Hidden treasure

She was Pandora, and the wallet was her box.

She wanted to leave the wallet where it had fallen, pretend she hadn't seen it, let it be someone else's problem.

Instead, she waited as long as she could on the street corner, unable to sever her last link with the person who had saved her life but also equally uncomfortable taking the wallet away from its owner's last known location. She stood with her arms wrapped around her torso, the toe of one shoe staking a claim on the wallet, watching to see if any oncoming pedestrians looked like they were on a mission.

Watching for _him_.

Aside from a ragged old man digging leisurely through a nearby trash can as though it were a well-stocked refrigerator, no one else seemed to be hunting for anything.

A light mist eventually compelled her to slip the wallet into her bag and retrace her steps to her apartment. The wallet was a hot coal against her hip as she trudged back to familiar territory. She kept one ear bud dangling uselessly as she walked, half expecting the owner of the wallet to call out or place an arresting hand on her shoulder. But she reached the steps to her apartment building unchallenged except for by a mute beggar with a cardboard sign relaying his hunger.

The wallet sat in the center of her card table, small and insignificant and alone. She stared at it from her perch on the kitchen counter, the rough wood cutting harshly into the backs of legs that were shaky from the cold, the damp, and the previously abstract concept of death. This little black square of synthetic plastic was so much more than it looked—it held answers to questions that she hadn't even known to ask.

If she opened it, she would likely see a smiling face, an address, and little pieces of a life that had nothing to do with her. She would likely hear a smooth, surprised voice on the phone as he agreed to meet her at a local coffee shop. And she would have to again watch him walk away after a brief, polite, and wholly unsatisfying exchange, two stars passing on forever asynchronous orbits in the night sky.

So Bella didn't want to open it. She fought the wallet's gravitational pull by unpacking a box of miscellaneous kitchen items. She continued distracting herself by unpacking every other box, suitcase, and duffel bag that she and Charlie had stuffed into the squad car. Only after the small space was filled with comforting bits of _Bella_ did she realize that, like Pandora, she would be unable to resist.

For, like Pandora's fateful box, the wallet also contained hope.

Hope that perhaps she'd imagined the panic in his eyes. That he'd fled the scene so quickly because there was somewhere important he needed to be. That she'd hand him his wallet and her gratitude and he would understand…whatever it was that she desperately needed him to.

However, in the time it took her to rip open the row of little Velcro teeth, her hope was expunged. The wallet lacked a driver's license, credit card, or any other clue as to its owner's identity. She couldn't even find a stray Starbucks receipt that would indicate where he got his morning adrenaline rush.

Bella realized that she had waited on the street corner in vain; there was nothing in the wallet that would have compelled him to return for it. For that matter, she couldn't even be certain that it was _his._ It contained nothing more than two crumpled dollar bills, a bus pass, a Seattle public library card, a folded reference card, and a picture of a striking blonde woman.

She arranged and re-arranged the items on the table in front of her, willing them to coalesce into a revealing patchwork of the life of the man who had saved hers. But no matter how she shuffled the items, she saw nothing more of him than a partial sketch on the back of a napkin. All she could glean was that he rode public transportation, liked to read, had an attractive past or current girlfriend, and was likely born in the 1980s when Velcro wallets were all the rage.

The folded 3" x 5" reference card only added to the enigma; on the front of the card were the 26 letters of the alphabet in a masculine scrawl. The back was partially filled with a series of hash marks, reminding Bella of the notations that prisoners in movies often make to mark the passage of time.

Frustrated, she tossed the empty wallet back onto the table, scattering its former contents like feathers from a down pillow. She had apparently been saved by an escaped convict who was penniless and borderline illiterate. The theory might explain the man's foreboding, his furtive exit from the scene, and the pain in his eyes. But it wouldn't explain his gentle hands or the fact that he'd bothered to save her in the first place.

Why did she even care? Why couldn't she let this go and get on with her new life?

Maybe because she was still in shock after her near-death experience. Because she would appreciate it if someone went that extra mile to return her wallet. Because it was rude not to thank someone for saving your life. And because it would be nice to know at least one person in this vast, impersonal city.

She tried to ignore the fact that the person in question had shown zero interest in knowing her.

With a sigh, she looked back down at the wallet's contents scattered across the table. Two of the six items had to do with a library. How fortuitous—finding a library was high on her to-do list anyway.

This time, she would Google it.

* * *

Bella needn't have worried about finding the library; her feet unerringly followed the city sidewalks like dotted lines on a treasure map. The destination itself was even a large _X_, a criss-cross of blue steel and glass that housed the Seattle Central Library. Despite the library's bizarre modern shell, the familiar smell of printed words welcomed her home with the whoosh of the glass doors.

She had planned for this to be a quick operation, like yanking out a wisdom tooth—go in, get the information she needed, and get out. But the sheer size of the library gave her pause; undiscovered books lay like nuggets waiting to be extricated from a lost gold mine. While she was here, she might as well peruse the library's classics collection and check out some of her favorites to fill the empty days before school started, days that stretched before her like closed doors down a deserted, dank hallway.

She followed the trickle of people headed toward a neon yellow escalator, which lolled like a tongue down from the second floor. When she stepped off the conveyance with a jolt, she was pinned where she stood by an oversized library map. She felt like a wide-eyed child in front of a glittering holiday display in a department store window. The abundant book genres and colors beckoned, but she was torn. Straight ahead was the circulation desk, whose magnetic scanners could reveal the card's owner in a single swipe.

Bella realized that she'd been staring indecisively toward circulation for too long when she made eye contact with a boy whose baby face probably belied his age. Their gazes parried awkwardly as she second-guessed taking the easy way out. The easiest thing to do, the logical thing to do, would be to explain the situation to the library staffer, who looked more than willing to offer his assistance. Of course, she would then risk him not being authorized to tell her to whom the card belonged.

When baby face detached himself from his computer and started wending around the austere cherry cabinet in her direction, she decided not to take the risk. Instead, she ducked her head and walked quickly in the direction that she hoped led toward the classical wing.

The farther she moved from the map, the less she could remember of what it had shown. It was a curse—geography would no more stick in her mind than raw eggs to a skillet. She'd grown up going with Jacob to La Push beach, but the one time she had struck out on her own, in her first and last attempt to see the sun rise above the waves, she ended up driving her wheezing Chevy in circles on back roads that cut through endless forest. It probably hadn't helped her sense of direction that she'd let Jacob take on permanent chauffer duty for her even before he had his license.

If Jacob were here now, in the library, he would be walking straight and tall, unerringly following the alphabet signposts to lead her to exactly where she wanted to be. Alone, Bella somehow wound up in the Home and Garden section. As she wandered down a miscellaneous aisle, she heard the sound of a library cart rumbling in her direction. The unwritten library rule, even with ten other beckoning, empty aisles, that one other person always comes down yours.

The other unwritten rule—should you happen to cross paths with another browser, ignore them at all costs. Bella grabbed the first book she could reach and pretended to be engrossed.

The library cart came to a stop, uncomfortably close.

"I wouldn't have pegged you for the _Car and Driver_ type," someone said from the end of the aisle. She looked up to see baby face peeking his head past a bookcase. Bella blinked down for a second at the book she had been pretending to thumb through—_Rebuilding Your Engine for Dummies._

She almost said, "My boyfriend is a big car aficionado." Almost, but then she decided that she didn't want to bring Jake here, to this place where he wasn't.

"Sorry to bother you," baby face said, stepping casually into the aisle with his hands in his pockets, "but you looked like you needed help earlier."

Bella re-shelved the book, which might as well have been written in Cantonese. "Yeah, I seem to have stumbled on the cars rather than the classics."

He laughed. "This library is huge; even I don't know where to find stuff sometimes."

As they made small talk, her eyes grazed the top row of books in his cart. She saw instantly that they were a neat row of excuses—none of the titles had anything to do with the home or the garden. The boy leaned against his cart nonchalantly when he noticed her eying it, effectively blocking the revealing evidence from view. Bella was surprised—and a little flattered—that he'd clearly gone out of his way to approach her.

In Forks, she had been off limits, a precious gem behind glass—the boys looked, but they didn't touch. This was especially the case in high school after Jacob shot up past the six-foot mark practically overnight and started riding around on his rebuilt dirt bike. His burgeoning muscles, which initially made him foreign under her touch, but which she eventually found increasingly attractive, were also effective in dissuading those who found _her_ attractive. She had exited school one day after the last bell to find Jacob standing nose-to-nose in the parking lot with the only guy who had ever dared ask her to an upcoming dance.

As Jacob had driven her home in his little red beetle, she snapped, "I'm not a shiny toy to be fought over."

Jacob had sat very still, and an entire forest of trees slipped by before he responded softly, "Bella, he was telling his buddies that he was going to be the first to show you how a white guy does it."

Bella had been mortified that she'd even been tempted to say yes to someone who clearly considered her nothing more than a prize to be won, a way to differentiate himself from the pack.

She didn't go to the dance.

At the time, she'd been thankful that Jacob had been her solid rock through the potentially chaotic high school years. She'd always had someone to talk to or to goof off with if she didn't feel like doing her homework. She'd never had to agonize over whether this boy or that returned her feelings. She'd never lacked a date for prom or any of the movie nights that her small circle of friends frequently organized.

Now, she felt like perhaps she'd missed out on spontaneous in favor of safe and steady.

As she looked into the boy's blue eyes, she decided that it couldn't hurt to be friendly. She learned that his name was Mike and that he was a senior majoring in kinesiology at UW. She did not volunteer her name, but he continued to pepper her with questions anyway. When he heard that she was fresh from a small town that he'd probably never heard of, he was enthusiastic and welcoming, and she was drawn to this first spark of warmth she'd felt in the big city.

As the conversation meandered to what her intuition deemed an inevitable conclusion, however, Bella became more uncomfortable. Mike had an expectant glint in his eye that screamed ulterior motive. She guessed that he wanted to ask her out, probably under the guise of showing her the city.

She'd never had any practice saying no; the guy who'd asked her to the high school dance didn't even bother confirming that she was not going with him after Jacob had intimidated him into a pile of blubbering goo in front of the friends he'd been working so hard to impress.

The thought of how Jacob would react to her going out for coffee with the first male who showed interest in her in Seattle didn't even cross her mind. Instead, she made a split decision about not leading Mike on and begged out of their conversation with a flimsy excuse about a deadline. Mike and his library cart rumbled reluctantly away.

When she made the circuit back to the main desk, several choice reads cradled in her arms, Mike approached her again, almost as if he'd been hovering.

"Do you want me to check you out?" he said, starting to walk in the direction of his station. Then he froze, horror rising in wide eyes. "I mean…not check _you_ out…just your books…for you…"

Bella took pity on him, shaking her head. "I think I'll just…" She pointed with her books toward one of the modern self-checkouts, one of the many perks of a modern library.

"Oh, yeah. Great!" Mike said brightly, although his expression slumped. "That's what they're for. I'll be over here if you need anything."

She'd only taken a couple of steps before he called out, "And let me know if the machine gives you any trouble. They do that sometimes."

"Okay." She continued walking to the station that seemed least likely to be in Mike's line of sight. Here she was trying to be surreptitious, but she was sure that Mike was over there trying to figure out how to use his master computer to get her name and number. Hopefully the fact that she would pop up under a male alias would confound him enough to allow her to make an escape.

She quickly swiped Good Samaritan's card and followed the prompts on the screen, only to be brought up short by a blinking cursor. The fancy pants Seattle library card just had to go and require a PIN, didn't it?

Perfect.

Bella could practically feel Mike's stare burning a hole in her backside. The longer she delayed, the longer he would have to work up the courage to finish what he'd started. Compelled to at least pretend to know what she was doing, Bella typed in the clichéd 1234.

She blinked when the computer burbled cheerfully and proceeded to the next screen. At the top were the two words she needed to see.

_Cullen, Edward_.

Edward.

Her savior's name _might_ be Edward.

In a surge of triumph, she gave Mike a small wave as she walked toward the glass doors. His face lit up like Christmas as he waved back enthusiastically. At the sight of how much her simple gesture affected him, Bella knew that she should feel something, anything. Instead, she looked at Mike's face and finally realized what was missing. His face, while handsome in that cherubic sort of way, was forgettable. Like with the library map, the farther she distanced herself from the library, the less she could remember of him, until all that was left were his blue eyes, fading to gray.

Unlike another face, the face that she secretly hoped to see on every person she passed on her way back to the place she now called home. She'd only looked into that face for a few fleeting seconds, but his depthless eyes, his translucent skin, and his stormy hair seemed branded to the back of her eyelids.

* * *

Bella's initial euphoria at her super sleuthing disappeared like dew in the sun when she found there were 56 Edward Cullens listed in the phonebook for the greater Seattle area.

How could such an unusual name have 56 doppelgangers in the same country, much less the same state? Even if she dialed the numbers, one by one, what would she say when someone picked up? _Hi, are you or someone in your household missing a Velcro wallet?_ They'd hang up before she even had a chance to explain, certain that she was nothing more than a prank caller feeding them a cheesy line.

That night was the first night she dreamt of Edward Cullen. Her wrought iron bed creaked as her limbs swam restlessly under the weight of the covers.

For even in her dreams, she was denied his face.


	3. The five thousandth candidate

Bella spent the remaining days before classes wandering the streets of downtown Seattle, a mouse in a glittering, shifting maze. She found several grocery stores that, although small, carried many of her favorite cooking ingredients. She made a circuit of the Space Needle, craning up at it dizzily as she went. She stood carefully back from the curb when waiting to cross the industrious streets.

After the incident at the library, she'd planned to cocoon herself in her small apartment all day and read the books she'd checked out, to fill her thoughts with the stories of others' lives. But something compelled her each morning to get up, take a shower, and garb herself against the chill that was beginning to steal over the city like creeping mist.

She told herself that she was going out because she needed to get to know the city's pulse, its pattern, its people. She told herself that she would be caged inside the austere buildings of the UW campus once school started, so she should take advantage of the crisp, chill air while she could.

But all the while, Bella knew that her aimless wandering wasn't aimless at all. She was hoping to find something. Or, rather, some_one_. She waited on their street corner at various times during the day and watched the bus, that same bus, with lingering trepidation as it rumbled down the same street. She watched as the bus passed again and again, unchallenged.

As she walked the increasingly familiar streets, she felt the ear-tingling, flesh-scalded feeling of being watched. She glanced surreptitiously into the faces of young art students in retro clothes as she passed groups of them, lounging and smoking.

But all her searching was to no avail; Bella did not find Edward.

He found her.

* * *

Her first week at the University of Washington, Bella felt like she was trying to board a train moving at top speed, clawing and scrabbling her way to keep up with the pace of the research study for which she'd been hired.

The professor under whom she would be working, Dr. Jenks, was the head of the UW psychology program. As such, he was apparently very busy. Before the semester had started, her correspondence with him consisted of a single, cryptic e-mail about the fact that he had a hectic schedule planned for them the first week of the semester.

Monday morning, she sat in a large, neat office with a lake view and watched a white-haired man with thick glasses digging through various filing cabinets and drawers as he gave her a five-minute overview of his life's work and how he expected her to help.

She listened to him talk until it became increasingly clear that she was in the wrong place.

"I'm sorry," she ventured when he paused for air, "but I think there's been some mistake."

Dr. Jenks inclined his head and looked at her for the first time over his glasses. "What do you mean?"

Bella nearly wilted under the intensity of his coke bottle gaze, but she pressed on. "I'm sorry, sir," she repeated firmly. "But I don't think I have the level of experience required for this position. Surely you received applications from other, more qualified candidates."

Dr. Jenks cocked his head at her slightly for a long moment and then said abruptly, "You took a class under a Dr. Ezekiel Martin."

Bella nodded hesitantly at the non sequitur, unsure why Dr. Jenks would have remembered that name on her transcript. One of her senior-level psychology courses had been under Dr. Martin.

"Dr. Martin was my mentor. He taught me everything I know. And he spoke very highly of you."

Bella was floored that the grizzled old professor who had not so much as looked at her while he handed back her liberally inked papers had remembered her name, much less repeated it to one of the premier research psychologists in the nation.

Reading her expression, Dr. Jenks said, "You received an A in his class, correct?"

Again, all Bella could do was nod. Nothing she'd done in the class had seemed good enough, and it had been the only class in which she'd been in danger of getting a B. She'd had to work her tail off to scrape by with a low A.

"Dr. Martin doesn't give A's," he said, cocking his head at her slightly as if inspecting a complicated crossword puzzle. "Hell, he didn't even give _me_ an A the first class I took with him. Apparently, in your case, he made an exception."

He studied her for another moment and then waved a dismissive hand. "Besides, I can't tell you how many applications I sifted through from pompous academics patting themselves on the back for even the most lackluster achievements. In my book, if you don't think you're the right person for this job, you're _exactly_ the right person for this job."

Bella spent the rest of the week proving to Dr. Jenks that his trust in her would not be unfounded. She did everything he asked, and then some. The work hours were much longer than she was used to, certainly much more time required than when she'd been a mere undergrad at a community college in the middle of nowhere. The one benefit of such a hectic week—she didn't have much time to think or to sit and stare at her apartment walls. She could almost forget about the owner of a misplaced Velcro wallet.

It helped that the research project she was involved in was absolutely fascinating. Dr. Jenks had received a large grant to conduct the first human trials of an experimental new drug that was showing promising results on increasing the mental capacity of animals. Every spare minute she had was taken up with assembling test materials for Dr. Jenks or screening applicants for Dr. Jenks or sitting with Dr. Jenks as he interviewed candidates.

Late on Friday, they stood and stretched while waiting for the final scheduled candidate of the day to be sent in to Dr. Jenks' office. Bella rolled her aching spine like a cat and watched as the professor's frustration seeped out in his tight movements, his increasingly terse comments. He had started hunting for promising test subjects at the start of the summer and had reviewed nearly 5,000 applications. The posted fliers and radio spots were kept purposefully vague, so as not to unintentionally limit the cross-section of candidates.

Now, he was behind schedule, burning through the grant money like it was dry kindling. In the past week alone, Bella had helped him sift through nearly 500 applications and had sat in on 30 in-person interviews. None of the candidates was "the one." Many of the people who had responded to the study were either homeless or were college students looking to make a quick buck. Some had deep-seated emotional imbalances that would require more extensive treatment than Dr. Jenks and his team could give. Others were physically handicapped, a fact that would unnecessarily complicate the treatment.

While Dr. Jenks had earmarked some of these people for the control group that would be given the placebo, he still needed the primary candidate. The current most viable candidate was a young woman named Mary who was a patient at the El Rey mental facility. Bella hadn't met her yet; she'd just heard Dr. Jenks mention her as the planned back-up candidate, the long-shot with an unusual psychological disorder that might benefit from the treatment. She and the eventual primary candidate would be the only two to receive the actual treatment rather than the placebo.

Dr. Jenks removed his thick glasses and palmed the back of his neck with a sigh. She was sure that, like her, he was wishing that the long week would end and they could both go home to their well-deserved weekend.

When someone stepped into the door frame, Bella looked up, preparing to welcome the five thousandth candidate as graciously as she had all the others, despite her emotional exhaustion.

Instead, her mouth opened soundlessly, and the blood in her veins turned to pinpricks of ice.

It was Edward.

…

…

…

_The _Edward.

…

…

…

Edward, who had dropped a cheesy Velcro wallet that was inexplicably empty. Edward, who had saved her life and then bolted like his hair was on fire. Edward, whose wraith's face and depthless eyes had been persistently absent from her dreams.

Edward was now hesitating at the door to Dr. Jenks' office like a shy toddler afraid to leave the safety of his mother's legs.

"Come in…" Dr. Jenks paused to look down at his paperwork for the name. She'd noticed that he couldn't see very well without his glasses.

"Edward," Bella whispered.

The green eyes flicked to hers once, confirming that she did, indeed, have his correct name. But his eyes did not soften with recognition; he gave no sign that he had ever seen her before, much less that he had saved her from being pancaked by a bus.

He didn't remember her.

She had spent every hour of every day since the almost-accident—both waking and sleeping— wondering who he was, what those brilliant eyes were seeing, what those lips were saying, what emotion tinged his cheeks.

And yet her face had fled from his mind like dandelion fronds on the wind.

"Come in, Edward," Dr. Jenks said in a soothing tone, beckoning. "Please sit down. This is Bella Swan, my assistant."

Bella choked out a poor excuse for a greeting and promptly dropped the stack of files she was holding. They flew out of her hands like a taut pack of cards released into the air, spreading chaos over Dr. Jenks' artfully organized mahogany work space.

While she scrambled to stack the test materials back into the requisite neat piles, Bella was hyperaware of Edward's every movement as he sat himself stiffly on the edge of the visitor's chair, as if his flesh rippled and bent the air toward her. Although one of the folders had fluttered to land near his pair of well-worn Chucks, he made no move to pick it up. Instead, he sat still, his gaze darting fitfully between the odd knick-knacks that Dr. Jenks, being the accomplished psychologist that he was, displayed as conversation-starters.

As Bella collected the final errant folder near Edward's chair, he raised a tentative hand to one of the items on the desk in front of him—a silver humanoid that was swaying in a cradle under the influence of two magnets.

"May I have a look?" he asked. His voice cracked, as if rough with disuse.

Dr. Jenks smiled and nodded. When Edward touched the humanoid with a single finger, it stopped swaying, and he frowned and removed his hand as if he'd been burned.

Having cleaned up the mess she'd made, Bella retreated to her customary spot in the corner of the room, behind Edward, while Dr. Jenks gave his little song and dance about what they would be doing today. Bella could probably have lip-synched to it by now she had heard it so many times. Edward remained impassive and silent. As with many of their other respondents, she suspected that many of Dr. Jenks' big words were like paper airplanes whizzing above Edward's head.

Bella tuned Dr. Jenks out until his voice was a faint drone and studied Edward's profile for the first time. She remembered his face as though she'd seen it through water rippling soundlessly in the dark. This living, breathing likeness, with its sharp planes and vivid color was so much more than a memory.

And yet somehow less.

In her memory, in her dreams, his face was alive, his eyes sad yet knowing, responding to her voice, her gestures with a quirk of his lip or brow. But this face before her now, while startling in its odd beauty, was impassive and dull, a rock not yet polished to its potential luster.

Bella found herself hoping against hope that Edward was yet another bored college student looking to score some quick cash that research studies often afforded. He certainly looked the part, with his retro long hair scraggling down past his ears and neck and pre-owned clothes that had probably come from the nearest Goodwill.

He didn't _look_ like someone with an IQ of 70 or below.

But looks can be deceiving.

As Dr. Jenks put Edward through the tests, her stomach retracted into an increasingly smaller lump. From the moment Edward received the first Rorschach card, it was clear that his mind was anything but normal. A normal human would have asked a few clarifying questions and then breezed through the cards with answers like "animal" and "bear" and "two people."

Instead, Edward stared down at a bat-shaped ink blot like it was a complicated Calculus problem, his face blank except for a slight furrow between his dark brows.

"Tell me what you see, Edward."

Dr. Jenks pulled monosyllabic answers out of him one at a time, like thorns from a dog's paw. Bella watched Dr. Jenks put on his glasses and lean forward in his chair, the pace of his notes increasing like a steam engine. But her own pencil hovered uselessly above her page after writing down the only two words that Edward said. "Paint" was his number one response, although he alternated with "blood" for any of the cards with red blotches. As the tests continued, Bella's unofficial estimate of Edward's IQ fell like a thermometer's temperature in a cold front.

Bella knew from her earliest psychology classes that the average person has an IQ of 85-114. For the purposes of his study, Dr. Jenks was looking for someone with an IQ of 70 or below, someone who was medically considered to be mentally retarded. Someone whose brain worked so slowly that it would be all the more impressive when it kicked into overdrive.

Part of Bella hoped that Edward would qualify for the study, that he would at last have a chance at a normal life. The other part of her ached for the sad, lonely little boy living in a grown man's body. She fervently wished that her assessment of him had been flawed, that he was merely quiet and slow but was more capable than anyone suspected. That he could be taught. That he could, in fact, learn.

She was wrong.

Dr. Jenks passed her a paper with his final assessment.

Sixty-eight.

He estimated Edward's IQ at sixty-eight.

After finishing a final test, Dr. Jenks fairly shooed Edward out of the office with a promise to call him on Monday, the first such promise that Bella had heard him make.

"He's perfect," Dr. Jenks beamed. "Wouldn't you agree?"

Bella agreed, but only because by "perfect" Dr. Jenks meant "less than whole."

"I'll take these up for final scoring," she said, slipping through the door with Edward's test materials and hurrying in the direction that he had gone.

She saw him down the sterile hallway, recognizing the hunch of his shoulders, fists balled in his pockets, even the ratty brown jacket. She was watching him walk away from her again, but this time, she was going to stop him.

"Edward, wait!" she called out to his retreating back. After a beat, his strides dwindled, and he shuffled his body in her direction, looking askance at her chin through his unruly hair as if to verify that he was, indeed, the Edward she meant.

"I think this belongs to you," Bella said, holding out his wallet in the center of her palm like it was a sugar cube.

She'd been carrying it with her, the only tangible reminder of her guardian angel.

He stared down at it for a second as though she were offering him something as odd as a frog to kiss. Jerking his head once to scatter the tangled hair from his face, he at last reached for the wallet, and it disappeared into the folds of his oversized coat.

For a moment, his shoulders tensed as if he were preparing for his rote, marching exit.

Instead, he smiled—really smiled.

And Bella was taken back to that epic moment of her childhood when she was five years old and first saw the _Wizard of Oz_ burst into Technicolor. Edward smiling was like the first glimmerings of a multi-hued rainbow after a storm. Edward smiling was like the sun fracturing across the surface of a diamond.

Edward smiling was her _favorite_.

But while it was the best of smiles, it was also the worst of smiles. The best—because his face when he smiled transformed from dull granite to polished bronze, all sun and grass and gleaming marble. The worst—because his eyes, while verdant, were like bay windows thrown open in welcome on a house that had been abandoned for years.

Edward smiling was day and night, sun and moon, abundance and destitution. Then his smile dimmed, and she was left with stars in her eyes, the residual of a camera's flash.

"Miss Bella," he said, shaping the words softly and carefully, like he was fondling a downy baby bird. "I didn't do so good, did I?"

His soft voice mesmerized her, until she realized what he was saying.

"You did great, Edward. Just perfect," she said sadly.

He smiled a small smile and inclined his head formally, and although she knew that he did so because he didn't know better, in that moment, she could pretend that he was a gentleman of a bygone era.

Then he was gone, and Bella was left trembling in his wake.

Her Good Samaritan was not a Good Samaritan at all. He remembered her name, but he didn't remember saving her life. He'd saved her life, but he hadn't really known what he was doing. She was standing here only by the grace of God.

The thought nearly brought her to her knees.

Bella had found her savior at last, yet he remained lost to her forever.

**

* * *

**

**Author's notes:** Now is the point that you need to be aware of one little detail that I did not include in my story summary due to space constraints. This story is a mélange of three concepts: (1) _Twilight_, (2) the independent film _How to Be_, in which a pre-Twilight Robert Pattinson plays a rather odd and useless—yet somehow still lovable—character named Art, and (3) a published short story and longer novel that shall remain nameless. For now.

Two points and a lifetime of Edward smiles to the person who can correctly name the short story/novel given the plot so far. And if you beta'ed this through PTB, you don't get to play. :)

The title of this chapter is an oblique reference to the fact that Catherine Hardwicke looked at approximately 5,000 candidates before choosing Robert Pattinson to play Edward. I thought it would be appropriate for Edward to be the five thousandth candidate for this research study as well. Nice little tie to real life. :)

Also, I've created a **promo video** for this fanfic. The link is in my profile.


	4. A new box

Bella stood in front of a row of duplexes slowly crumbling beneath the inexorable kiss of rain from Seattle's tormented sky.

She looked down at her printed instructions to confirm the unit number, only to find that the ink on the page was starting to blotch and blur, leaving only the vaguest outline of what she remembered as an M and a 3. The watercolor ink on the page reminded her of the blurred green of Edward's eyes. It reminded her that the faceless savior of her dreams was quickly rippling and blurring in her memory—replaced by only a fractured, imperfect shell of the man she had imagined.

Exhaling shakily through her nose, Bella slid the now useless map back into her tote and stepped carefully onto the moss-carpeted sidewalk leading to duplex M3.

The week after Edward's initial interview, Bella was assigned to learn more about his "natural habitat." Dr. Jenks' words—they made Edward sound like he was an endangered species. Which, for Dr. Jenks' purposes, she guessed he was.

"Talk to his employers, their family, their friends," Dr. Jenks had said. He needed her to collect information about Edward and Mary's medical history, habits, and preferences so that the research team could have a baseline for the study, a level of behavior against which to track the candidates' progress.

While Dr. Jenks was ecstatic about Edward to the point of mania, the other people in Bella's life were not. When she next talked to Jake on the phone, he reacted exactly how she expected.

"You've been assigned to study a retard?" he said, trying to poke fun at the situation like they had always done to get themselves through high school.

Bella bristled at the derogatory word but tried not to let her frustration at Jake's ignorance impact the rest of their conversation. She tried not to let the resulting sadness clutch too firmly at her chest. Instead, she quickly steered Jake to safer topics, like the ridiculous number of fancy foreign cars that she'd seen so far in the busy Seattle streets. Of course, he immediately wanted details, like brands and series numbers and colors. She managed to dredge up enough information on the topic from her murky memory, distracting him enough that they hung up before he had a chance to ask her any more questions about her role in the research study—or any more questions about Edward. She hadn't even told Jake his name.

Charlie was a lot harder to distract.

"You shouldn't be going on any errands alone," he said when she told him the types of things that Dr. Jenks expected her to do.

"In the city, you're never really alone," she said lightly.

"Just be careful, Bells," Charlie said in his no-nonsense cop tone. "Especially when you're around this Edwin character."

"It's Edward, actually. And he wouldn't hurt a fly," she said, hoping that her words were true. Despite the fact that he'd saved her life, she didn't know him. Not really.

Charlie wasn't convinced. "Yeah, I've heard that before. Promise me you'll keep that pepper spray close." If it were up to him, she'd wear the pepper spray in a clunky bracelet around her wrist, her pointer finger practically glued to that trigger. Charlie would certainly not have approved of Bella taking a bus alone to the outskirts of Seattle to track down one of Edward's long-lost relatives.

For her first task was to have Edward's and Mary's closest living relative(s) sign a release form authorizing them to participate in the study. Then she could start the process of compiling information about their backgrounds and medical histories.

Compiling information about Mary was easy. With a single phone call to the El Rey institution, Bella learned that Mary's legal guardian had long ago signed over her power of attorney to the institution. She also had no employers, family, or friends. The institution could send over her entire medical file after receiving the appropriate authorization from Dr. Jenks.

Compiling information about Edward was less easy. Not because he wasn't cooperative (he was) or because he couldn't provide her the information she needed (he could). Rather, it was because of how her heart clenched painfully in her chest the few times she interacted with him, the way her eyes automatically shied away from his face because his expressions were not ones that she expected, that she _wanted_, to see.

She also ran into a snag getting his release form signed. When Edward was leaving Dr. Jenks' office after another meeting, Bella again followed him down the corridor. He was wearing his same brown plaid jacket, with his fists again in his pockets, and his gait was again stiff and ungainly.

"Edward," she said, and he turned immediately, almost as if he'd been hoping to hear her voice.

"Miss Bella," he said, and she was again distracted by the way his mouth softly caressed her name. She looked down at the paper in her hand, away from his oddly darting eyes, to focus.

"I need one of your relatives to sign this form so that you can be in our study," she said. "Do you have parents or siblings who live near here?"

At her words, Edward's eyes grew troubled, and he shook his head a little too forcefully. "I have to go now," he said. "I'm going to be late."

He swiveled abruptly on his heel and disappeared. Bella couldn't tell if he had shaken his head in answer to her question or not. The next day, however, he brought her a scrap of peeling, grubby paper with a name and a phone number.

"My sister," he said softly, again turning to leave before she could get any more details out of him.

Based on Edward's reluctance to provide the information, Bella was not certain that the relative in question would even sign the form. But after a brief phone conversation, Edward's sister agreed to meet with her the following day.

As Bella approached the unit number that Edward's sister had given her, she could hear screaming through the thin walls—the high-pitched wailing of at least one child and an answering string of profanities in a harsh female voice.

Bella knocked on the peeling paint below the crooked M3 symbols. Immediately, the noises from within the duplex ceased, and the door opened abruptly to reveal an unexpectedly familiar face—after the brief disorientation of déjà vu, Bella realized that it was the same face that she had seen on the photo in Edward's wallet.

The same face—but the woman standing in front of Bella was a far cry from the picture perfect girl in the glossy photo. The picture must have been taken when she was in high school, her golden days when she was popular and prom queen.

Time had run a slowly devastating hand across the canvas of her face, like a once-pristine ice sculpture warping oddly the longer it remained on its lonely platform. A jaw that was once chiseled now drooped with the weight of years. Blue eyes once full of the luster of life had dimmed due to the reality of what they had since seen. She was a good twenty pounds heavier than in the picture and was slightly stooped due to the weight of a skinny baby on her hip. The baby had drool all down its chin and naked chest. Behind her, Bella could vaguely see two toddlers of stair-stepping ages playing with blocks on a floor streaked with grime.

"Can I help you?" The woman's tone was anything but welcoming.

"Yes, I'm Bella Swan. We spoke on the phone? I'm here about Edward." Bella expected the customary smile and invitation to enter. Instead, the woman's eyes narrowed, and she jiggled the baby on her hip irritably.

"Right." The woman's unblinking eyes appraised her for a second. "I'll save you some trouble; if he's sick or needs money, I'm not interested."

Bella was starting to see why Edward hadn't been thrilled to give out his sister's contact information.

"No, he's doing fine," she said quickly, unsure at this point if the woman would consider that fact a good thing. "I just need your signature on something and need to ask you a few questions. Can I come in?"

The woman eyed the release form Bella pulled out of her tote and hesitated for a few more seconds. Then she finally turned her head away, toward the children on the floor, and stepped back to let Bella pass.

"I'm Rosalie," she said in afterthought, and Bella smiled faintly as she surveyed the room into which she had stepped. It didn't look any more appealing than it had through the crack in the door.

"How old are your children?" Bella asked politely, guessing from the resemblance that Rosalie herself was the mother.

"Three, two, and six months," Rosalie said, confirming Bella's guess. So Edward had nieces and nephews. Bella wondered if he even knew. Oddly, Rosalie was looking down at her brood less like a mother hen and more like an art enthusiast showcasing the prime portraits in her collection.

Like their mother, the three children were beautiful. Golden-haired, light-eyed cherubs with pink lips and cheeks. But, like their mother, their beauty was marred, in their case by the filth on their hands and mouths. Basking in the grown-up attention, the oldest little boy threw a handful of jagged blocks at his sister, then looked up at Bella with a proud, harsh grin that made him look like an evil clown—or a little demon. With a start, Bella saw that his eyes glimmered green—like Edward's. Somehow, she couldn't envision Edward ever throwing blocks at the now red-faced and crying little sister.

Rosalie looked fondly down at the little boy with a small, hard smile and did not comment on his mischief, instead stepping across miscellaneous toys and sitting on the nearest chair that wasn't covered with child paraphernalia. Bella followed and awkwardly bent to shift some miscellaneous items from the couch before gingerly sitting herself on its edge.

"When you told me that…Edward…was involved in a study, I didn't know quite what you meant," Rosalie said. Her lips had formed Edward's name awkwardly, as though they were out of practice. Perhaps this was her oblique way of asking a question about an unwelcome topic.

"Edward has agreed to be one of the first human candidates for a drug developed by a joint team out of the University of Washington and the Seattle Neuropsychology Lab."

Rosalie exhaled once through her nose and then said flatly, "Edward has participated in a lot of studies. He's been given a lot of drugs."

And Bella could only blink because Edward had been a little foggy on his earlier medical history. But she pressed on. She explained that this drug was different. That this drug might increase his capacity for intelligence. That the drug had shown promising results on animals for years.

This drug might give Edward the chance to be normal.

As Bella spoke, Rosalie watched her with the unblinking gaze of a cat, her face stoic as though she'd heard this speech before. As though she'd heard these arguments before. In the pressing silence when Bella was finished, Rosalie made no comments. She asked no questions. Instead, she said merely, "What do you need me to do?"

Rosalie was humoring her.

Bella explained the release form to her and sat back while Rosalie scanned the legalese quickly. Again, she made no comments and asked no questions. Then she took the pen from Bella's outstretched hand, scrawled her signature in the appropriate locations, and shoved everything back at Bella.

Rosalie had just signed her brother's life away for a cause she didn't even believe in.

"What else?" she said.

Bella quickly shuffled the papers in her hand. In any other situation, Bella would have already given up on the hostile, unproductive environment and would have said her goodbyes. But this wasn't just any other situation. This was important.

This was for Edward.

So she started down the list of questions about Edward's family and medical history, feeling like she was trying to pick elusive fleas off a dog's back. It quickly became clear that Rosalie didn't have any answers about Edward's recent history, including where he currently lived or where he worked.

But she could remember the exact day when her little brother had been diagnosed with mental retardation.

"Middle of my fourth grade year. Edward would have been five. I remember the day well because I made the mistake of telling my supposed best friend about Edward's diagnosis." Rosalie stared into the past now. "I made her pinky swear not to tell anyone else, but of course the entire class knew by the end of the day."

Rosalie shifted her head slightly, as if listening for the echoes of that merciless teasing. Bella wondered if little five-year-old Edward had felt the displaced brunt of Rosalie's humiliation.

"Do you have siblings?" Rosalie asked, suddenly switching gears, and Bella shook her head. Her parents hadn't stayed together long enough to produce any more Baby Swans. "Then you don't know what it's like to have your parents doting on one of them. You don't know what it's like to have a brother who everyone at school makes fun of, and you by association."

Bella didn't know how to respond. "No, I guess I don't."

She lowered her eyes away from Rosalie's accusing ones, and they continued down the list of questions.

"Did your mother use drugs or alcohol while pregnant with Edward?"

"Not that I know of," Rosalie said. "The doctors never did find any reason for his condition." Bella wasn't surprised; in one-third of mental retardation cases, the cause was never determined.

"Was Edward ever mistreated or physically abused as a child?"

The slightest pause.

"Not that I know of," Rosalie repeated, but her eyes shifted away from Bella's face for the first time. Bella merely looked at her for a second, sensing something behind her answer, like a deep pool obscured by a layer of leaves in the forest. But she was afraid that Rosalie might metaphorically clamp down on her finger if she probed any deeper into that cavity.

Instead, she asked neutrally, "Does your family have a history of mental retardation?"

"No," Rosalie said, almost harshly, her eyes snapping back to Bella's face. "_My_ children are whole." The angelic children looked up at her with eyes that didn't look whole. They looked starved, but not for food. If Bella had to guess, she would say that they were starved for love, discipline, and any semblance of warmth.

"One final question," Bella said, tearing herself away from the want and need in the children's eyes. "Does Edward have any other living relatives that you would suggest that I talk to about this?"

The question wasn't on the sheet, but Bella hoped that there was someone else she could speak to—anyone else.

Rosalie merely shook her head. "No. Everyone who mattered is dead."

The interview wrapped up quickly after that, as the six-month-old on Rosalie's lap started spitting up all over the couch. Bella thanked Rosalie for her time, told her that she had a lovely family, and fairly fled from unit M3.

She could almost feel those cold, hard eyes branding her back as she hurried away, her coat collar turned up to ward off a chill, one that had nothing to do with the weather.

* * *

Bella's day went downhill from there.

That afternoon, Bella had an appointment with Dr. Jenks to tour the Seattle Neuropsychology Lab for the first time. She would also be meeting Mary, who had recently been moved to the lab facility from her more permanent home at the El Rey mental facility for the duration of the treatment period. Unlike Edward, Mary was unable to live independently.

With the gusto of Willy Wonka showing his chocolate factory, Dr. Jenks gave Bella the VIP tour of his little corner of the lab. Everything was sterile and white, down to his lab coat, shirt, tie, and shoes. Bella saw white mice effortlessly solving mazes, chimpanzees animatedly signing to each other about a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and even a border collie that could recognize over 1,000 verbal commands.

"And it's all thanks to this little serum," Dr. Jenks said, waving a hand at an impressive array of test tubes filled with a colorless liquid. "The product of over 30 years of my team's blood and sweat."

Bella was again struck by the sheer size and importance of the program into which she had stumbled. She shook hands with various other people in white coats as they wended through their own maze of endlessly white hallways.

The final stop in the tour was a room down a more remote hallway with no foot traffic. As they approached a white door, Bella saw a large window in the wall framing the slight figure of a young woman. The woman was sitting in a room containing the first splash of color that she had seen since entering the compound.

The color was pink.

A pink nightgown encased a slight form sitting in a pink wood rocking chair next to a twin bed covered in a pink bedspread.

"This is Mary," Dr. Jenks said unnecessarily, for Bella already knew.

As Bella stared at her, Mary's dark head lifted, and her dark eyes stared right back. She had deep bruises lining her eye sockets, as though she had trouble sleeping.

"Can she see me?" Bella asked, feeling like she shouldn't move her lips in case Mary could see that she was talking about her.

"No," Dr. Jenks said lifting a chart out of a tray by the door and checking something on it. "It's a one-way mirror."

Nevertheless, Mary's eyes continued to bore into Bella's with uncanny accuracy. When Dr. Jenks finally reached down to the door handle, the spell was broken. Mary dropped her eyes and went back to her slow rocking.

Dr. Jenks stepped into the room, but Bella remained standing at the threshold. From her new vantage point, Bella could see the rows of stuffed animals lining a small bookshelf in the back corner of the room. She could see a child-sized table and two chairs, a plastic tea set artfully arranged on the flowery pink tablecloth.

"Good afternoon, Mary," the doctor said. "How are you doing today?"

"Good." Her voice was small, childlike.

"I'm glad to hear it." Dr. Jenks looked back at Bella and beckoned for her to enter the room. "Mary, there's someone I want you to meet. This is Bella."

"Hi, Mary," Bella said, approaching the foot of the frilly twin bed.

Mary didn't even look up. "I don't like her."

Dr. Jenks' face remained calm and friendly. "Now, Mary, I'm sure that once you get to know Bella, you'll become great friends."

Mary just shook her head furiously, causing her chin-length hair to whirl violently around her face, like a horse tail swatting away an unwelcome fly.

"Alright," Dr. Jenks soothed. "We'll be back to see you later. Let the nurse know if you need anything, okay?"

"'k."

As Dr. Jenks ushered Bella out of the room, he said in a low voice, "Don't worry. She's always like that when meeting new people."

Bella felt a little less unsettled, but not by much. Today had not been her day for meeting new people.

"What's her condition?" she asked as they stood for a moment looking into the pink room.

"It's difficult to classify, really, which is why we're not sure if the serum will be of use to her. We unofficially refer to her condition as _puer aetemus_."

Bella frowned. She'd never heard that particular nomenclature. Seeing her confusion, Dr. Jenks added, "It means _eternal child_. In layman's terms, this little girl just never grew up."

They left Mary then, clutching a teddy bear close to her heart as she rocked alone in the middle of the pink, frilly cage.

* * *

Bella was back at the university the next morning, sitting in her coat closet of an office trying to decipher the notes she had awkwardly scratched in Rosalie's crushing presence. She was distracted, thinking about bodies and minds and how sometimes they were mixed up, about the fact that the people who deserved sound minds or bodies most were sometimes not granted them. And the people who had them didn't even appreciate them.

She was distracted by the memory of cold blue stares and blank brown ones and foggy green ones.

Just like before in her apartment—before she had found Edward—she found herself trying to use the snatches of information she had gleaned from Rosalie to piece together a more complete picture of his life. But no matter how she rearranged the knowledge in her mind, she still saw only an incomplete fragment, broken shards of green-tinted glass.

"Did Rose talk to you?" a soft voice said, and Bella looked up from her notes to see Edward himself standing hesitantly in the door to her office, his fractured gaze darting everywhere but at her face.

At the sight of him standing all scrawny and submissive before her, she felt the breath leave her lungs. It was the first time that he had approached her on his own, the first time that she had not had to go out of her way to get his attention. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, his body language betraying nervous worry about her answer to his question.

"Yes, she talked to me," Bella said, and Edward visibly relaxed, his smile widening. Then a thought occurred to her, a potential reason for Edward's earlier hesitancy on the matter. "How long has it been since Rose talked to you?"

Edward grew still, and Bella assumed that it was because his brain was slowly trying to process the calculations required to answer even that simple question honestly.

"A while," he said eventually, with only a hint of a smile.

Bella looked at his open face and couldn't see Rosalie or Mary in it anywhere. If Rosalie was the cold, seeping night and Mary the pale, smooth moon, Edward was the bright, warming sun. His presence had already started to thaw the chill that yesterday had cast over her soul. And the sight of Edward turning to leave—prematurely, as always—was like an impending cloud cover.

"Wait," she said, scrambling up from her desk and knocking over her pencil holder with a clatter. "I have some questions to ask you also. Could I walk you to your bus?"

"Okay," Edward said, cringing a little from the sight and sound of Bella's pencils, pens, and scissors cascading across her desk and the floor. "But we need to go quick, or I will be late."

Bella didn't bother to pick up the mess she'd made. She just closed the door on it and followed Edward. They trekked across campus at breakneck speed, Bella frantically trying to write down his answers to her panted questions. She learned that he lived alone (_Alone!_) in an apartment in the seedy Belltown area of Seattle. She learned he worked two jobs, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. She learned that his favorite restaurant was _Joe's_ (although she hadn't asked).

When she asked him for more details about his places of employment, they had just arrived at a deserted bus stop. Edward froze and looked at her with wide eyes, his expression one of a little kid about to ask to stay up past his bed time.

"Can I show you?" he said.

Bella was startled. "Show me? You…want me to go work with you today?"

He nodded. Bella knew that she should decline, that Edward might very well not be able to handle her intrusion on his routine. That she herself might not be able to handle it.

But she couldn't have stopped herself if she had tried. Something about Edward Cullen had sucked her in even before she knew who he was. He had shown kindness to her when she was all alone and lost. She wanted—she needed—to see, to understand this man who had saved her, who had haunted her every waking and dreaming thought since her first day in the city. Even if he was damaged, only a fractured shell of the man she had imagined, she had searched for him for too long to deny herself this glimpse at his unusual life.

This Pandora had found a new box.

"Okay," she said.

Even as she spoke the word, her rational mind told her that her acceptance of his request was foolish and risky and probably even dangerous. She had read _Of Mice and Men_. Her father was a cop. She knew better. But the resulting delight in Edward's face—the breaking of a new dawn—was enough to push all doubt out of her mind like crumbs off a table.

"You will be my friend?" he exclaimed, and Bella nodded eagerly, so caught up in his enthusiasm that she wouldn't have protested if he had grabbed her hands and started doing "Ring around the Rosie." But he didn't grab her, he didn't touch her. He just stood with his fists in his pockets and smiled his special smile at her.

When the bus hissed to a stop, she stuck her forgotten notes into her tote and stepped aboard into a day in the life of Edward Cullen.

* * *

**Author's note:** I don't know about you, but I'd give anything to step into a day in the life of Edward Cullen. :) Also, as many of you have guessed, the plot of this story is based in part on _Flowers for Algernon_ by Daniel Keyes. The story was later made into an Academy-Award winning movie named _Charly_. Pick your poison; there are elements of this story from both.


	5. A day in the life

* * * * *

The wind created miniature whips of hair that stung at her eyes and cheeks. Despite her discomfort, Bella couldn't have stopped herself from smiling if she tried. Ironically, she was on a bus—with Edward Cullen. He had cracked his window open as wide as it could go and currently had his face pressed into the breeze.

After Bella had followed Edward onto the bus, the other mysteries of the Velcro wallet were unraveled, one by one. To start, Edward produced his bus pass with a flourish along with a rumpled dollar bill, shaking his head emphatically when she offered to pay for her own fare.

Now, she was sitting on the cracked leather bus seat with him, so close that his khakis almost brushed against her jean-clad thigh. She could see the bulge of his wallet in the pocket nearest her hip. The wind was doing a tantalizing tango with his hair, and she saw that his nose and cheeks were quickly turning pink where they were exposed to the crisp fall air.

Everyone on the bus was looking at them oddly, in darting glances that Bella sensed but caught only glimpses of, but not because Edward had his face out the window. The regulars on the bus were clearly used to Edward and this type of behavior. What they were not used to, however, was the fact that Edward had a female friend—a female friend who he had insisted on introducing to every person on the bus.

Despite the consistently shy demeanor that Bella had observed from him so far, Edward Cullen apparently craved human interaction like a heroin addict craved a hit.

"This is my friend, Miss Bella!" he had crowed proudly, marching her up and down the aisle like a drum major, waiting with an expectant smile until everyone exchanged pleasantries. Blushing furiously, Bella gamely extended her hand to everyone he indicated, and most put limp fingers into her palm with polite smiles. The old bus driver watched them through his oversized rearview mirror, a twinkle in his eye, and did not pull away from the curb until they were safely in their seats at last.

As the wheels on the bus went round and round, Bella's mind swirled with ideas about where Edward spent his days. She could envision him in a bakery shoveling ingredients into a huge mixer, a swathe of flour on his cheek. She could see him working on a road crew digging ditches in a little orange jacket and steel-toed boots.

She never once pictured him moving through lofty stacks of books. For the bus hissed to a stop in front of a familiar modern building.

"You work at the Seattle Central Library?" Bella asked in a daze as she followed Edward off the bus.

"Uh huh."

"Why?" she blurted out, without thinking. As soon as the single syllable slipped from her lips, she stopped still in front of the glass doors, wanting desperately to snatch the word back out of the air, to swallow it back down into her stomach.

But Edward didn't notice her rudeness. He didn't realize that the question in any way belittled his mental abilities. Instead, he cocked his head at her, as though the answer was obvious.

"Because I want to be smart," he said, and slipped through the doors.

Bella watched the thin pane of glass close between them, a visible reminder of the other, less tangible barrier separating their minds.

When they went up the now familiar neon yellow escalator, Bella followed Edward to a wing she hadn't found in her previous meanderings. He stopped and looked at her for a moment, his arms outstretched as though she was a wiggling puppy that he wanted to stay put. Then he hurried off down the central aisle and disappeared through a door marked _Employees Only_.

After the door snicked shut behind him, the library was quiet, deserted in the mid-morning. Bella could hear only the ticking of a faraway clock. The silence of the book stacks weighed heavily on her soul as she imagined Edward standing hopelessly in front of them, his arms outstretched in welcome of a fountain of knowledge that his mind simply wasn't able to contain. Hopefully, Dr. Jenks' treatment could change that. Hopefully, Edward would someday be smart.

"Well, if it isn't _Car and Driver_," someone said. She turned reluctantly away from the direction Edward had gone and saw that Mike's forgettable face was looking at her hopefully. "Come to check out more books?"

"Actually, I'm here visiting a friend." Bella gave Mike a small smile and turned her attention to the shelf in front of her in what she hoped was a big enough hint.

Mike didn't take it.

"I never did get your name the other day. Although I'm fine with calling you _Car and Driver_. If you want."

She didn't want. "It's Bella, actually."

"So, Bella, there was something I was meaning to ask you."

Mike was talking to her, but all Bella could hear was the sound of a library cart rumbling closer. She looked past Mike and saw that Edward had retrieved a cart laden with books and was steering it her way, hunched over like he was driving a plastic car.

"So what do you say?" Mike said, and her eyes focused back on his face.

"About what?" she said, stupidly.

Mike tried to frown and smile at the same time but failed at both. "About grabbing some coffee…? With me…?" His voice trailed off hesitantly, and Bella's spirits sank as she realized she'd been too distracted by Edward's reappearance to sidestep Mike's inevitable question.

Before she could answer, Edward brought his cart to a screeching halt nearby.

"Miss Bella, I see you have met Mister Mike," he said, taking two large steps toward them like he was carefully toeing a line in the sand. "This is Miss Bella, my friend." He turned his green eyes fondly on her, but Bella's stomach dropped as she realized that hers wasn't the only name to which Edward appended a formal prefix. Selfishly, she had hoped that—at least in some small way—he considered her special. But she should have known better; he did not even remember saving her life.

Obviously, she was anything but special.

"We've met," Mike said flatly, his eyes never leaving Bella's. He angled his back toward Edward, visibly trying to exclude Edward from the conversation. "Now, when he says _friend_, does he mean that you two actually know each other from somewhere?"

"Yes, he's participating in a research study at my university. We're hanging out today."

Mike's eyebrows rose, making his face look even rounder and younger. "You're hanging out alone with Cullen?"

Bella nodded.

"I don't like it." She frowned, but part of her noticed that he hadn't exactly said it wasn't safe. "Why don't I tag along? My shift is scheduled to end soon anyway. We can get that coffee later."

"I'll play tag!" Edward said, and Mike again ignored him, rolling his eyes at her knowingly as if they were sharing a private joke.

In that instant, Bella stopped debating what her answer to Mike would be. She said, "I'm sorry; it's just me and Edward today."

"Well, maybe tomorrow we could—"

"This research study is going to keep me very busy," she said flatly, mirroring Mike's tone from earlier, the tone in which he'd addressed Edward.

And Mike finally got it.

"Yeah, okay," he mumbled. "I guess I'll see you around."

As Mike stalked away, Edward waved jovially at him. "Bye, Mister Mike!"

Then he turned back to Bella. His gaze slipped across her face, but he did not notice that she was flushed. He did not notice that her eyes were overly bright. He could not have known that these were signs that she was surprised and even a little proud that she'd spoken up and told Mike exactly what she thought.

Edward saw none of these things. Instead, he grinned at her and said, "Watch me hunt."

And she did. She watched how he carefully inspected each shelf for the precise location of the book that he pulled from the cart. She watched as he painstakingly matched the letters of the alphabet to a reference card that he pulled out of his Velcro wallet. She watched him delightfully mark off each successful find on the back of the card with a half-chewed pencil he pulled from behind his ear.

Each time he slid a book into a slot, he looked at her slyly out of the corner of his eye, as if to make sure she was watching. Each time, she smiled encouragingly. She didn't have the heart to tell him that he was putting some of the books in the shelf upside down.

Whereas her earlier days in Seattle had stretched on, the day with Edward seemed to be passing as quickly as a train at a crossroads. She felt like each hour was a precious jewel to be hoarded. He was an addicting book that she couldn't put down, a glorious contradiction in sweet and sad. He had made her come alive.

And it was only noon.

For lunch, Edward took her to his aforementioned _Joe's_, a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant within walking distance of the library.

"My man Edward!" a man who seemed much larger than he was rounded the counter and slapped Edward enthusiastically on the back. He was wearing a slouched white chef's hat and a white apron that said "Kiss the Cook."

"Hello, Emmett," Edward said, immediately turning to introduce Bella. She immediately wondered why Emmett was not _Mister_ Emmett. Emmett's smile cooled as he looked her up and down, like he was surveying an animal in the wild.

But he said only "Hi there" and focused in on Edward like a hungry dog focused on a steak.

As Emmett prepared a meal for them, Edward reported about their day so far. He must have said the words "Miss Bella" a dozen times in his first several sentences. Each time, Emmett's eyes flicked briefly to hers.

When Edward told Emmett about the research study—although he called it a science project—Emmett turned immediately to Bella and asked, "Is this true?" There was a cold gleam in his blue eyes that Bella didn't understand.

"Yes," she said slowly.

"So you're hanging out with him so that you can study him?"

And Bella understood.

"No." She raised her chin to him, almost defiantly. "That's not it."

"Then why?"

"Because he's…Edward."

And Emmett understood.

When she tried to pay for her food, Emmett wouldn't let her.

He leaned over the counter and said in a low voice, "I've told the kid that the food is free after noon. It's the only way I could get him to stop paying me for it." His eyes sparkled. "Besides," he added, "you being here with Edward is payment enough."

And they shared a look of perfect understanding.

"If you ever need anything, anything at all, you let me know," Emmett said, mirroring Edward's goodbye wave.

She nodded her thanks and left a large tip in the Masen jar on the counter.

Carrying brown bags loaded with generously appointed meatball sandwiches, Bella and Edward walked the short blocks down streets that slanted steeply, continuously tipping them toward the water. Like back at the campus, Edward walked quickly, always ahead of her, and she had to struggle to keep up. But every now and again, he slowed down abruptly, and she had to fight not to plow into him from behind. She eventually realized that his gait was erratic because he was trying not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk.

They sat on a bench in a grassy public area near Pike's Market and watched tankers loaded with red and blue and orange storage cubes on their way to the orient. They ate in comfortable silence, except for the odd occasion in which Edward squinted up at the sky and laughed—at what, Bella could not be sure. The only thing marring the sky was the occasional seagull.

Other than when she was with her father, Bella had never sat with anyone in companionable silence like this. She'd been unnecessarily worried about how Edward would react to her presence; he had folded her into his day like she'd always been there, as smoothly as water parts for a rock in a stream. She realized with a start that this was the best non-date that she'd ever been on. Jake would have been snarking about the homeless people taking a nap in the nearby grass or would have been constantly jumping up to lean over the nearby railing.

After lunch, they made the seemingly longer uphill trek back to the nearest bus stop. Edward informed her that they had to catch several buses to get to his next job, which he referred to as "Discovery." She had no idea what he was talking about but gamely followed—an action that had apparently become second nature for her when it came to Edward Cullen.

When he again stopped abruptly in front of her, she barreled into him from behind, her palms pressing against his rough jacket in an effort to steady herself.

"I'm sorry…" she said but trailed off when she saw that Edward was gazing intently at something. "What is it?"

Edward didn't answer, and so she followed his gaze through a nearby pawn shop's window. She saw layers upon layers of junk—some of it shiny, some of it rusted, all of it useless. It was hard to tell what treasure Edward was finding amidst this trash.

"Do you think it will make pretty music?" he asked wistfully, his gaze never wavering from whatever it was he was looking at. She scoured the piles of castoff and abandoned items in search of something that might be capable of making music. At last, her eyes spotted a small piano keyboard tucked into a corner, a shining beacon in a lost sea.

"If it works, it should make pretty music," Bella said carefully, looking up at Edward's profile, wondering not for the first time what he was thinking.

"Can you play?" he said with hope in his voice, looking askance at her chin for a second before his eyes were drawn inexorably back to the black and white keys lined up in a neat little row.

Bella almost snorted at the question, but she restrained herself; Edward probably wouldn't understand the reason behind the harsh sound. Instead, she said merely, "No."

"Me either." Something about the way he said this, the way his lips and eyes turned down as if a great sadness weighed upon them, made her want to contradict what he was saying.

"Edward, I'm sure you could play if you had a keyboard."

"No. It is _forbidden_." He stressed the word sternly, standing up straighter and wagging an index finger in clear imitation of someone else. She was reminded of a four-year-old playing dress-up in adult clothes while trying to act the part.

"Who told you that?"

"My mama."

Bella frowned, wondering what type of woman would forbid this special child to make the music that was currently causing his eyes to darken with want and need.

"Well, _I_ would love to hear you play someday."

Edward's spine stiffened, and he partially whipped his head around in shock, his eyes wide and focused somewhere past her head, with the same expression he'd worn when staring over her shoulder at the bus he'd saved her from. But he didn't reply; he merely shook his head a little too emphatically—as if telling himself that she obviously didn't know any better—and trudged on.

They caught several buses to the north of the city. This time, Bella didn't even blush when Edward introduced her to their fellow commuters. While his behavior continuously contradicted the social norm, it was the first time in her life she had felt truly accepted and appreciated. Someone was proud of her, just the way she was.

This day with Edward had so far been one of the best and worst of her life. She had seen Edward bring out the good in people. People who were kind to him, whose eyes lit up when he came in the room. Who patiently listened to him ramble about his day. Who fed him when he was hungry.

But Edward had also brought out the bad side of people. People who rolled their eyes at his slow speech and ignored his irrelevant comments. Who turned their face to a bus window in silent refusal to shake the hand of a disabled person's friend. Who pointed and giggled behind their hands at the odd man making his contorted way down the streets of Seattle.

Being with Edward had allowed Bella to see the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. But the worst was yet to come.

They disembarked from their final bus near a wooden sign bearing the words "Discovery Park." The name was appropriate, for Bella felt like she was discovering an oasis of sand and sea surrounded by the otherwise steel and structure of the city. A few steps into the park, and she was home.

Edward took her first to the groundskeeper station. From a small supply closet, he collected his tools, which consisted of a plastic pole with a sharpened end and a black garbage bag.

As he was fluffing out the garbage bag with a loud snap, the door to the station opened, and a bony old woman walked in, having just driven up in the Jeep Bella could see through the window.

"Edward, you brought a friend?" the lady said, and Edward's head bobbed in emphatic agreement of her word choice. But before he could offer his customary introduction, the lady turned to Bella with an overly bright smile. "Hello. My name is Sue. I take care of this park."

Sue spoke slowly. Sue spoke loudly. Sue spoke like she thought Bella was mentally challenged.

Bella didn't like it. Sue's words and tone were like quick left and right hooks to her pride. Anger surged up her spine and down her fingertips as she grasped Sue's hand a little too firmly. "Bella Swan. I'm a research assistant at the University of Washington."

"Oh." Sue blinked rapidly as she retracted her hand. "Then why are you here?"

"Edward is participating in a study that my professor is conducting. Would it be alright if I go with him on his shift today?"

"She's my friend," Edward supplied helpfully.

Sue's eyes shifted rapidly from Bella's face to Edward and back again, as though she was having difficulty comparing Edward's apple to Bella's orange.

"I suppose that would be alright," she said doubtfully. "Just make sure that you check in with me when you're done." With a final, curious glance at Bella, she walked out to her Jeep and drove off.

As Bella followed Edward down an expansive path forged through fields of waving grass, she was ashamed. She'd been angry that Sue had assumed she was mentally challenged. She'd felt like she had been spoken down to like a child. She'd reacted quickly and decisively to differentiate herself from Edward so that it would be clear that she wasn't like him. That she truly was the orange to his apple.

Edward had just become the lens through which she saw herself. And she didn't like what she saw. All day, she'd been mentally patting herself on the back for how mature she was being, how gracious, how accommodating of Edward's idiosyncratic ways. How supportive.

Yet at the first opportunity to deny him, to differentiate herself from him in the eyes of even a lowly groundskeeper, she had immediately done so.

She was far from the best; she was the worst.

Bella looked up from her shame to see Edward standing on the edge of a cliff. His back was to her, a dark, jagged intrusion into the layers of water and sky that stretched infinitely in either direction. She noticed for the first time that the sun was beginning an early descent into the sea, its reign in the sky cut short by the constraints of winter in the northern hemisphere.

Bella never did get to see the sun rise over the beach at La Push, but Edward had just unknowingly given her a sunset over the same waters that lapped against her home's shore.

She'd just put him down; he'd just lifted her up.

And the setting sun was perfectly positioned around Edward's head like a celestial halo.

Bella's strides wobbled as she approached him, as if in subconscious warning of things to come. She'd never been great with heights. When she carefully stepped close enough to Edward to see the wide path cut into the side of the bluff, she breathed easier. It was a well-manicured path with sturdy-looking hand rails to help prevent even the clumsiest of research assistants from plummeting into the sands below.

As they picked their way down the path, their roles were reversed. Bella became the one with the disability and Edward the one to guide her. Every exposed tree root, upturned stone, and even the merest of twigs seemed intent on snagging her strides and upending her into the earth. There was a reason why hiking wasn't high on her list of hobbies.

Oddly, Edward wasn't racing down the path ahead of her, as she fully expected him to after consistently lagging behind him all day. Maybe it was because there weren't any unnatural cracks in the path on which they trod. Maybe his pace was slower because of the occasional piece of litter that he reached out to pluck and ensconce safely in his bag.

But she noticed that he hovered only a few steps in front of her. And whenever she stumbled, he stood ramrod still until she regained her footing, almost as though he was offering his shoulder for her to lean on. He never touched her or reached out a helping hand to steady her. But he was there, and it was enough.

When the dirt path devolved into sand, Edward began lovingly combing the quarter mile of beach to remove all traces of humanity. He held up each piece of recovered trash like it was a gold medal. Never taking her eyes off him, Bella removed her shoes, dug her toes into the cooling sand, and thought about the fact that—despite his disability—Edward Cullen was the most exceptional person she had ever met.

Despite his disability—or perhaps because of it.

But then he broke the spell he'd cast on her by exclaiming "Race you!" and sprinting up the path, his garbage bag banging awkwardly against his legs. As the sun's final descent into the sea rippled the water toward her, Bella realized he wasn't coming back.

He had left her to find her own way home.

* * * * *


	6. Not mine

The absence of him was everywhere she looked.

He was not waiting for her at the top of the path. She had hoped against hope that she would find him staring out over the darkening waters, searching for something that only he could see. But her eyes could not find his still form highlighted against the sky.

Edward was also not waiting for her at the groundskeeper shack. Instead, Sue's Jeep was idling nearby, its headlights illuminating the merest slices of the night. Sue rolled down the passenger side window and leaned over as Bella approached. She didn't seem surprised that Bella had returned alone. She didn't ask where Edward was.

Instead, she asked merely, "You need a ride?"

Bella read her tone for what it was, empty words required to fill empty space in polite society, words with a faint undertone of _I told you so_. Bella's knee-jerk instinct was to decline. But then she looked to the headlights illuminating the dark road ahead, and she realized that she didn't want to walk it alone.

"Could you give me a lift to the bus stop?" she said.

On the brief, bumpy ride, Bella filled the silence with questions about Edward—what he talked about, whether he was reliable, how high his quality of work was.

Sue's answers were not particularly helpful. "He's quiet. He comes to work on time. He does as good of a job as can be expected. He checks in when he leaves."

Bella did not want to ask the next question, but she knew she must.

"Did he check in today?"

"Yes."

Quieter now. "Did he say anything about me?"

"No."

They drove the rest of the way in silence. When Sue reached the main road, Edward was not at the bus stop. The bus had already arrived to transport him away from her.

* * *

Bella spent the next several days compiling her notes about Edward and Mary's respective situations. She distilled the details of their lives into simple rows of letters on a white page, dried bones lined up at an archaeologist's dig. Like mere bones, her simple words could never capture the complexities of Edward's life, the complexities of the emotions she felt, the network of veins and capillaries and muscle and flesh all combining into something uniquely Edward.

The simple words could not express Edward's loneliness.

* * *

But the next time she saw Edward, he was not alone.

She had stepped into the lab, on her way to deliver her promised notes to Dr. Jenks. Edward was hunched over a computer set up in the center of the room, his body angled toward a dark head that bobbed in tandem with his own.

He was with Mary.

Bella watched them huddled close, like they were shutting out the world. Sitting next to each other, they were a study in contrast: tall and small, bright and dark, animate and inanimate.

When Edward finally registered Bella's presence and looked up to see who had entered the lab, he beamed at her hugely and waved, as though he'd not left her to navigate the dark streets of Seattle alone back to her small haven. To follow a trail of breadcrumb buses with their confusing numbers and flashing names of streets she'd never walked. She could almost see him tumbling breathlessly onto the bus, giggling that he'd won his race by such a hefty margin.

It had never even been a contest. Bella had picked her way slowly back up the path, the surf pounding in her ears as if in warning that, if she fell, there would be no one around this time to catch her, no one against whom she could steady her trembling limbs. Edward's constant, comforting presence was gone.

Now, Bella's steps were drawn unerringly to his presence like an alcoholic to the finest brandy. Edward watched her approach for a moment, as if unsure that she was, truly, heading toward him. When he deemed her trajectory undeniable, he immediately stood up.

"Pause it!" he cried, his fingers scrabbling for the correct key at the same time that Mary did. In rapid succession, they alternately paused and unpaused the game, causing the images on the screen to stutter awkwardly as Bella watched. In the mayhem, one of the little men that the keyboard apparently controlled careened into a wall with an exploding sound effect.

"You're dead!" Edward said to Mary with a laugh, then oriented his body toward Bella's. Mary stuck out her tongue when Edward wasn't looking.

"Miss Bella, this is Miss Mary," Edward said, proudly showing off his shiny new toy. Just like that, with an introduction similar to one she had heard many times, Bella felt replaced, like a withered rose in a vase exchanged for a fresh daisy.

"She beats me every time!" Edward said in amazement, like losing was a good thing. Maybe it was, if you'd never had anyone to play with before. "She's very good."

Mary certainly seemed good, albeit in a different way than Edward meant. The shadows on her face and in her eyes were less pronounced than those Bella had seen the first day they had been introduced. As Bella had approached the pair, she had even seen Mary's lips curl in the hint of a smile each time she scored a point.

"We've met," Bella said, as warmly as she could despite the icy fingers of jealousy clutching at her skin. "Good to see you again, Mary."

Mary's only response was to glare at Bella, as if she'd just interrupted her private time with Edward. Bella had to restrain herself from visibly reacting when Mary put a single, dainty hand on Edward's forearm.

_Mine_, Mary was saying.

Edward did not notice Mary's silence or her hand on his arm. Standing at the apex of their little triangle, he was puffed with pride, his eyes darting between their respective collarbones—not unlike a dog unable to decide which of its owners to welcome first upon their homecoming. He watched them expectantly, as if waiting for them to hug and kiss, looking like he'd found his place in the world, a spot from which he would happily never move again.

Mary broke the silent standoff with a disdainful sniff. As she turned back to the computer console, Edward watched her expectantly, as if trying to decipher this new game his new friend was playing.

"Let's finish, Edward," Mary commanded, staring straight ahead, firmly away from Bella. "I need to beat you one more time before lunch."

And Bella felt like she was standing in the playground in second grade all over again, watching the boy she secretly liked follow Lauren Conrad's blonde pigtails wherever they bobbed off to next.

Of course, Bella didn't like Edward the way that she'd liked that boy in the playground.

She couldn't.

Edward seemed agitated by the choice forced on him. He frowned and wrung his hands. But only for a second, until a switch flipped in his brain, his smile nearly blinded her, and he turned back to his side of the keyboard without even a final apologetic glance.

Mary had crooked a metaphorical finger, and Edward had come running.

As Bella left them to their game, walking toward Dr. Jenks' office, the sound of Edward's guffaws punctuated every other step. She should be glad he'd found another friend. She should be glad he'd found an intellectual equal who wanted him just the way he was.

Instead, she felt like, through his very act of finding, she had lost something.

She tapped on Dr. Jenks' open office door, and he looked up immediately, the light of his monitor reflecting harshly against his glasses.

"I brought you my notes, like you asked," Bella said, holding up the manila folder of her printouts.

"Excellent!" Dr. Jenks took the packet out of her outstretched hand. "Have a seat."

From this angle, Bella could just see the backs of Edward and Mary's heads through the door. She watched the heads draw close together frequently, like they were sharing schoolyard secrets.

"This is very insightful," Dr. Jenks said after a long silence, looking up at her for a moment over the stapled paper in his hand. He set the work gently at the top of a nearby stack of his "to do" pile, likely to go back and read through in more detail later.

"Thank you. I spent…some time on it," Bella said, her eyes still watching the dynamic duo.

"We are lucky we found Edward," Dr. Jenks said, steepling his fingers. "He's right on that threshold, achieving the bare minimum to function as a productive member of society. He can navigate the bus system. Hold down two jobs—remarkable."

Of course, she'd only written about the remarkable parts. She'd left out the part about him leaving her to fend for herself.

"Mary, on the other hand, is…difficult." Bella knew exactly what he meant. She'd read in Mary's files that, in all the years that she'd spent at the institution, she'd never bonded with any of her keepers. They had a hard time keeping a permanent nurse assigned to her because of the constant vitriol in her gaze and voice.

"The fact that Mary has bonded with Edward so quickly is a testament to Edward's unique gift—his ability to accept those around him without judgment or question."

She turned her head away from Dr. Jenks to see Edward try to give Mary a high five. He missed and slapped softly at her wrist instead.

The simple gesture was like a slap in Bella's face.

He'd just touched her.

Edward had just voluntarily touched Mary.

"They complement each other nicely, don't you think?" Dr. Jenks asked.

Bella nodded in automatic agreement, but her stomach knotted when Mary took the opportunity to grab Edward's hand. They stood for a moment with hands clasped, smiling at each other like toddlers sharing their first love.

Bella tried to be happy for them. But really, she was happy when Edward carefully removed his hand from Mary's as if prying it from a cookie jar. She was happy when Edward wiped his hand on his ever-present jacket in a seemingly subconscious gesture.

"They've delighted in playing that game together since they were introduced."

"It's not just a game, though, is it?"

"No, it's an analysis tool used to track mental acuity. Their scores have increased only marginally since they started playing this game a week ago."

Bella looked back at them. "At least they seem to be having fun."

Dr. Jenks followed her gaze. He hadn't gotten to where he was today through hard work alone. Or maybe she really was more transparent than she hoped.

"Bella," he said gently. "I've become very fond of him as well."

Her eyes snapped to his in shock, as if he'd just admitted a cardinal sin. "Really?"

"Of course. Emotion is what makes us human. It fuels our passion for this wonderful profession in which we get to help hapless souls find their way."

Passion. Is that what she was feeling?

"But you need to remember what is happening tomorrow," Dr. Jenks continued. "There are no guarantees. We need to do our best to remain emotionally detached."

Tomorrow.

Phase 1 of the treatment began tomorrow.

* * *

That night, she called Jacob to distract herself from what she'd face the following day. He seemed initially surprised to hear from her—lately, he'd been the one initiating their calls—but they quickly fell into their customary conversational groove, like tires finding familiar ruts in a well-travelled country road.

"Tell me again why you can't come home this weekend," Jacob whined in his best Lauren impression.

Normally, she would laugh at his tone; he had always been great with voices. This time, she felt mild irritation settling through her stomach, like glitter sinking to its resting place in a recently shaken snow globe. He knew why. She'd told him why. More than once. But he'd been harping on this topic for their last several phone conversations like a dog gnawing at a favorite bone. And here he was again, bringing it up, at least this time in a funny way.

"You _know_ why," Bella said, in mock (yet not) exasperation. "This is a big week for me."

_The_ week.

The week after the procedure.

"The procedure is tomorrow, right?"

"I'm surprise you remembered," Bella said, letting a hint of sarcasm seep into her voice like a dash of lemon in a glass of tea.

"Oh please. I couldn't forget something if I tried. My mind is a steel trap."

"And here I was hoping it was because you hang on my every word."

"That, too," Jacob agreed with a laugh. "Can you come home two weeks from now, then?"

She marveled at how easy it was for him to skip ahead, to vault past the monumental procedure that had become such a landmark in her life, something that she'd been working toward for over a month.

Had she really only known Edward for a month?

"I guess that depends on how the procedure goes."

"Fair enough. What happens if it works?"

Bella's socked foot grew still from where it had been tracing the contours of her iron bed frame. She had not allowed herself to think about the answer. She had been subconsciously refusing to even mentally ask herself that question, to dwell on what would happen next. But now that the question was posed, now that it hung in the air like a giant red balloon, she couldn't help but think about its answer.

"We're not sure what will happen if it works," she said slowly. "No one knows exactly how the drug will affect humans. It will probably make Edward and Mary smarter."

"Edward?" Jacob asked suddenly, all trace of banter gone from his voice.

"The prime in the study."

"You've never mentioned this Edward."

She sat up from her bed and frowned, wondering why Jacob seemed to think this a big deal. "I've told you about him. I guess his name just never came up."

"Huh." A long pause. "You told me Mary's name."

"Yeah, I guess I did," she said, uncomfortable at the abrupt u-turn their conversation had taken. She'd called Jacob to drive her thoughts away from Edward, not toward him at full speed ahead. Unbidden, her eyes found the Polaroid she'd tucked into the frame of her dresser mirror.

"Look at you remembering Mary's name," she said, almost out of desperation, as she stood and moved to stand in front of the mirror.

Jacob took the bait. "Oh, you know what they say," he said slyly, "there's something about Mary."

"Hardy har har," Bella deadpanned as she fingered the edge of the Polaroid.

"Steel trap, remember? Something that you with your general paleness would not understand."

"Yaddi yaddi, pale is bad, I get it." She plucked the photo from its ledge. "Why are you dating such an albino anyway?"

"You're not an albino, you're…" Jacob said, searching for the right word, "…a porcelain doll."

That visual was almost romantic.

He continued, "One whose face I could break between my giant bear paws with hardly a squeeze."

That visual was not.

But as far as distractions went, Jacob was always a nice one. They continued chatting easily for several more minutes, until Jacob declared that he needed to take off.

Bella couldn't resist a parting shot. "Serves me right for dating a minor with a curfew."

"You know you love being a cougar."

They hung up, and Bella was left staring down at a picture of Edward's familiar face. One of the lab techies had snapped it when Edward was in the middle of telling one of his stream-of-consciousness stories, something about a dream he'd had in which a wooden puppet became a real boy. The picture had been taken at the climax of the story, when Edward's face was most animated, his eyes most bright, his smile most wide. It was an awkward angle of an awkward expression, but Bella had silently snatched the picture as soon as the techie had discarded it.

The last thing that she saw before going to sleep each night was Edward's smile.

* * *

The next time Bella saw Edward, he was not smiling. He was in the lab, sitting in a chair not unlike one found in a dentist's office. Her practiced eye noted that his skin was pale, paler than usual, as if his body was subconsciously trying to disappear into the white sterility surrounding him. A white cart laden with gleaming silver utensils and vials filled with clear liquid sat a few paces from where his limbs splayed awkwardly in his chair.

It was tomorrow, and the procedure had begun. Bella was standing in an observation room with Dr. Jenks and a host of his colleagues.

She watched as white-coated technicians began sticking on round, white EKG sensors to the bleached, exposed skin of Edward's chest, his temples, his upper arms. The sensors fused with his body, trailing their tendrils to waiting machines that tracked his life force.

For a moment, the white coats obscured her view. Then the technicians stepped away, and Edward's eyes found her face through the looking glass.

In all the flurry of last-minute preparations, Bella had not had the opportunity to say anything to Edward.

When he saw her now, he granted her a smile, a proffered gift only for her, and he raised a hand in greeting. Bella raised her own limp hand back in a feeble wave, too unsettled by the alien pallor of his skin under the harsh fluorescent lights to be as enthusiastic in return. When Edward retracted his hand, his arm tangled in the white snake wires, causing the nearest technician to rush to extricate his wrist from where it dangled limp, ensnared. Unexpectedly, dread tip-toed across her chest, leaving burning footprints on her skin.

She had not had a chance to say goodbye. It was too much; she had to look away.

Away sat Mary primly in her own chair a few paces from Edward. But unlike Edward, she lay back with her eyes closed, her face serene, a cadaver in a casket. She did not even twitch as the white coats swarmed around her like buzzards, applying more of the snaking wires and swabbing the skin of her arm at the anticipated injection site.

Despite Mary's stillness, her body was not relaxed. In its stillness, it almost seemed to vibrate, like a violin string wound so tightly it was about to snap. Preparations complete, the white coated techies turned white-masked faces to the window.

With a single nod, Dr. Jenks gave the signal.

In tandem, two oversized needles filled with the clear serum were held aloft. Two needles were flicked. Two needles spouted a thin, weak stream of liquid. Two needles were positioned along the delicate veins of two limp, unresisting arms.

In the stillness, in that momentary pause between a crack and a tree branch forever falling to the earth, Bella saw Mary twitch for the first time.

Then Mary's eyes snapped open, her eyes dark, endless pools of despair.

At the same time, two needles slipped into the soft flesh of two inner arms.

And Mary began to scream. Her mouth opened wide, her back arched off the chair, the tendons in her face and neck straining mightily against her flesh.

"No!" she screamed.

"Please!" she screamed.

She screamed bloody Mary.

At the sound, Edward was startled from his placid, cow-like acceptance of his surroundings, his eyes darting to behold the spectacle that Mary was making. Not to be outdone, he added his shouts to the fray, kicking his legs like a toddler in a car seat.

In response, the white coats descended on the pair, gloved hands reaching to soothe and silence and smother. Edward flailed happily at the hands like a boy splashing bath water. Bella glanced over to see Dr. Jenks' face tight with worry, but he said nothing, made no move to stop the procedure. His body language carefully communicated _This is normal_ and _This is expected_. But his eyes told a different story.

The level of serum in the two needles slowly sank, like sand leaking from an hour glass. All the while, Mary spit and bit and Edward clenched a smile at the ceiling.

When the last of the serum had disappeared from view, sucked up greedily by engorged veins, the white coats parted to reveal a still shaking Mary and an Edward whose green eyes were focused firmly on Mary's face, as if waiting to see what exciting thing she would do next, a boy waiting for a fat toad to explode off a lily pad.

When the needles were retracted, were tucked away like little swords hidden in their sheaths at last, Mary went still. She closed her eyes.

It was like she had never moved at all.

Edward eventually grew bored of watching an inanimate corpse, and his eyes once again found Bella's. He gave her the weak smile of a man who was about to fall face-first into a warm, soft bed at the end of a long day.

This time, Bella could not smile back.

Instead, she turned and slipped from the cold, sterile room into the brightness of the main lab. She looked almost unseeingly at the white walls closing in on her slowly like a garbage compactor.

She wasn't even aware that Dr. Jenks had followed her out into the main lab until he spoke. "It will be okay, Bella. Mary has always had an irrational fear of needles. It will all be fine."

_Fine, fine, fine, _echoed his eyes and his voice and his face. He was telling her, but he was also telling himself. As he turned back to his pet project, Bella wasn't sure that anything would ever be fine again.

But all they could do was wait.


	7. Miracle of miracles

* * * * *

The wait was shorter than anticipated—only one week.

One short week that felt like a hundred years—because Bella did not spend that week with Edward. That week, she stayed far from the lab, not wanting to see Edward restrained. Not wanting to see the wires snaking from his flesh as he was poked and prodded and monitored and tested.

She wanted to remember him talking softly to himself in the library stacks. She wanted to remember him standing on a cliff with the sun at his back. She did not want to watch him experience the side-effects that Dr. Jenks anticipated as his blood transported the serum throughout his body.

"Most of the animals became very aggressive while their circulatory system did its job," Dr. Jenks had said. "The border collies, in particular, exhibited symptoms not unlike rabies for a period of three days. All indications pointed to the fact that they were in excruciating pain. They lashed out at anyone who came close."

At his words, Bella's mind produced a single, still frame of Edward frothing at the mouth, his green irises usurped by white as his eyes rolled back into his head.

That week, the halls of the psychology department were nearly devoid of Dr. Jenks' staff; everyone was working overtime shifts at the lab in silent vigil to see if the sweat and blood they had poured into this project was going to pay off at last. To see if the sleepless nights they'd spent, the quiet hurt on the faces of their wives and husbands and children and parents, to see if these things were going to be worth it after all.

Each day of that week, Bella called Dr. Jenks for an update.

"No change," he would inform her tightly. "I'll let you know as soon as there are any new developments."

Each day of that week, Bella could hardly eat. She could hardly sleep. She didn't have the emotional energy to return Jacob's calls.

Then—one week to the day when the oversized needle had first invaded Edward's skin—the wait was over. Bella was sitting in another incomprehensible lecture when her cell phone buzzed with a call from a J. Jenks. Without hesitation, she slung her bag over her shoulder and walked straight out of the classroom without even a backward glance at the startled gazes of her professor and peers.

"Hello?" she answered breathlessly when she was scarcely out in the hall.

"Bella!" Dr. Jenks said, his voice feverish and distorted above the pandemonium on his end of the line. For a second, she thought she was hearing screams of terror. She imagined that Dr. Jenks and his team had inadvertently created their own Frankenstein, a green-eyed monster that had come to life and was now destroying them all.

"Dr. Jenks," she responded, fighting to keep the panic from her voice so as to not unnecessarily alarm the students drifting nearby. She clamped a hand over her exposed ear desperately in an effort to hear him.

"Bella!" he repeated. "It worked! You need to get down here!"

Behind him, she could hear a babble of excited voices and a pop like that of a champagne cork. Excitement bubbled up through her body, a tidal wave of emotion that she had repressed over the last weeks and months but that now threatened to consume her.

"I'll be there as soon as I can." Her voice was even, but her heart rate was anything but.

The trip out to the Seattle fringe was maddening. She stood stiffly at the bus stop, tapping her foot impatiently in tandem with her racing heart. She sat on the edge of her seat in the front row of the bus, urging it forward like a whip on a steed. When it arrived, she flung herself down the bus steps, narrowly squeezing through the still-opening doors.

One of the technicians—whose name tag proclaimed her to be Jane—was waiting for her in the lab reception area. Jane escorted Bella silently through the maze of hallways, walking briskly as though eager to return to a party. As they walked, Bella tried to think of a question to ask, any question, but her thoughts were too jumbled, her emotions too tangled and excited and scared and oh dear Lord she was going to see Edward.

A new Edward.

With a small smile, Jane swiped her access card and gestured that Bella go ahead.

Bella stepped through the door to the lab, and time seemed to slow. The normally empty, sterile lab was an explosion of color, movement, and sound. The normally dignified, reserved lab techs had thrown off their white lab coats, had discarded the glasses perched on their noses, had holstered the pencils stuck behind their ears.

They had donned pointed party hats, were blowing on expandable kazoos, and were squirting silly string. It was complete and utter mania. The mania of a team who had pulled together for long, fruitless years. The mania of a team who had finally achieved success, had finally reached that lofty pinnacle that had only ever been the stuff of science fiction, of fantasy, of dreams. The mania of a team who was about to change the world.

Bella could feel a smile break across her face, and she began to push forward through the throng of people, many of whom she had never seen, making her way toward the nexus of the activity.

The sea of gyrating humans at last parted for her, and she stepped forward to see what all the fuss was about.

Her smile faltered when what she saw was Mary sitting at a computer console—alone. Mary looked up as she approached, a sickly sweet smile on her face.

"Hi Bella. I'm Mary Alice Brandon," she said. "I would like you to call me Alice, not Mary. I don't like the name Mary."

Then Mary/Alice went back to playing her little game.

Bella's vision contracted until Mary's prim, smiling face was all that she could see. Her eyes shifted to the left, to the right, but they did not find what she was looking for. They did not find a pair of startlingly green eyes. They did not find a mess of dull, tangled hair. They did not find an awkward smile, awkward limbs, an awkwardly upturned foot.

Instead, they found Dr. Jenks, standing nearby in a cluster of his peers, laughing and clinking his champagne flute so forcefully against other glasses that the bubbling liquid spilled over the edge of the crystal, forever lost to the floor.

She stared at him, and he finally sensed the weight of her stare despite the chaos. He sensed her at last, and his gaze shifted to meet hers. When their eyes locked, he stopped mid-sentence, his mouth ajar.

Heads craned to look in her direction, and the room grew quiet.

In the silence, Bella asked, "Is Edward…?" The question dangled, unfinished. Dr. Jenks' eyes cooled, and he waved her away from the people crowded around Alice like cars at a drive-in movie.

"Edward is still…under observation." Dr. Jenks said, and Bella nearly flinched at the mental image of wires and needles. "He's in his room. Come."

As they walked, Dr. Jenks told her that Mary was well on her way to tripling her score in the game. He told her that she had woken up this morning and had started talking and laughing and had not bitten anyone. Her brain seemed to be undergoing an exponential transformation.

Bella did not respond; she merely followed Dr. Jenks blindly down the familiar hallways to a heavy white door. She waited as he swiped his badge for admittance and swung the door ponderously open.

Bella had half expected to see Edward lying limply on a bed surrounded by those snaking wires and whirring machines and white-coated leeches.

Instead, when she peered around Dr. Jenks' broad shoulders, she saw Edward sitting on the floor in the middle of an austere room, one knee pulled up to his chest. The thick restraints fastened to his Spartan bed hung limply, thick vines suffering from lack of water. The gray light cast by a small, barred window shone faintly on his face, and Bella saw that he was staring intently at the colored blocks on the ground before him, as if willing them to coalesce into a glittering tower of Babel. Yet he seemed to lack the energy to start stacking the blocks.

When Bella stepped into the room, he raised his head.

"Miss Bella," he whispered, and his face sparked weakly, a failing light bulb only sporadically illuminating the darkness. The smile that Bella had grown to know and love was only a pale shadow of its former radiance. Edward looked drained and more gaunt than normal. His appearance sent a network of cracks through Bella's cemented heart.

"Hi, Edward. How are you?" She was proud that her voice didn't shake.

"Not so good," he mumbled, the first time he'd ever answered that question in anything but the affirmative.

"What's wrong?" She looked frantically to Dr. Jenks for her answer, her eyes shining with fear, but the good doctor merely smiled sadly and waved her attention back to Edward.

Edward sighed, the final gust of air from a deflated balloon. "Mary is too smart for me now. She doesn't want to play with me."

And Mary or Alice (whoever she was) wasn't the only one. Not two rooms away, an entire team of people who had doted on Edward over the last several weeks were now rejoicing around their little miracle, the long-shot on whom the treatment hadn't even been expected to work. While the sure thing, the horse upon which everyone had placed the biggest bets, was sitting in an empty room alone, forgotten like a former prize stallion put out to pasture.

He couldn't even understand why he had been left behind.

The miraculous treatment had worked—just not on Edward.

* * * * *


	8. From Seuss to Socrates

Two weeks later, Alice had progressed from Seuss to Socrates, devouring every book that was put into her hands like it was her last meal. She was comprehending texts written at a tenth-grade reading level in a matter of days. She was effortlessly solving calculus problems, balancing chemical equations, and diagramming even the most complicated of sentences.

With Alice's increasingly savant-like brilliance, however, came a savant-like trade-off. Her personality, it seemed, was not keeping pace with her brain power.

When Bella expressed concern about Alice's flat affect—which she likened to the perpetually serene expression of the Mona Lisa—Dr. Jenks explained, "Her cognitive abilities are increasing so rapidly that her emotional centers have not yet adjusted accordingly."

"Will they adjust?"

"We hope so."

They hoped that Alice's occasional little Mona Lisa smirk would eventually blossom back into the sassy smirk of a girl who hadn't been afraid to tell new people that she didn't like them.

For Alice, two weeks was too soon to tell.

For Edward, two weeks was telling.

After two weeks, Edward was still struggling to keep his little character alive in the computer game that Alice could now win practically blindfolded.

"Am I smarter?" Edward would ask hopefully of Bella, who sometimes sat with him and watched him play the game, since no one else would.

"You're doing fine, Edward," Bella would encourage, despite the fact that his little man crashed into the wall again and again with a grating sound that began to fray Bella's already tattered nerves. Edward's mental abilities remained as constant as they had been since the day they had first tested him.

Turns out, Bella hadn't needed to say that goodbye after all.

Somehow, that fact was a double-edged sword, pricking at her emotions no matter how she thought about it. Edward's situation tugged at Bella's heart strings so firmly that she was surprised her heart didn't rip in half. Her hopes for him teetered on a perpetual balance. Some days, she hoped that the serum would kick in suddenly, with the force of an adrenaline rush. She hoped that he could be smart at last. Other days, she couldn't bear the thought of losing his smile, that glorious smile that he was generous to share. He was so beautiful when he smiled.

In this case, would the rewards be greater than the cost?

After the observation period, they decided to give him another injection of the serum, just to be sure.

"Edward," Dr. Jenks said gently, "we'd like to give you another treatment." Bella was sitting at the periphery of Dr. Jenks' office, watching Edward, as always. At Dr. Jenks' words, she saw Edward's face darken. She saw his eyes cloud in memory of pain.

Edward began to ask a series of slow questions that felt like deliberate knife thrusts in Bella's gut. Would it hurt? Would it make him smart? Would Alice be with him again? Dr. Jenks told him that yes, it would hurt. Hopefully, it would make him smart. No, Alice would not be joining him this time.

Edward looked down at his left shoe, which he'd curled to rest on top of his right.

"Could you stay with me?" he mumbled.

"Yes, I will be with you throughout the procedure," Dr. Jenks said soothingly.

"No," Edward said, shaking his head. "I mean Miss Bella." His gaze hopped from his worn Chucks over to where her own, smaller Chucks were kicking up against the edge of the cabinet on which she was currently perched.

Bella's heels froze from where she had been softly drumming them against the cherry wood. "You want me to stay with you?"

"Yes," Edward informed the floor solemnly.

Bella could not answer. If she stayed, she would see his whitewashed flesh writhing with the pain of the fire in his veins. She would see the wires snaking like Medusa from his body. She might see him cry.

Edward raised his eyes to look at Dr. Jenks firmly. "If Miss Bella will still be my friend and will stay with me, I will do it again. I will take the bad shot."

She promised Edward she would stay.

Dr. Jenks pursed his lips but made all the necessary arrangements. He gave her a note of explanation to give to the professors whose classes she would miss that Friday. He reserved a room for her at the lab. He even granted her a temporary access card.

The day of Edward's second treatment, Bella did not remain on the other side of the looking glass. This time, she held his unresisting hand as the needle sunk into his skin. She watched from the doorway of his room as the nurses tucked him in to bed and adjusted his restraints. She curled up to sleep on her own mattress in the room next door, separated from him by nothing more than a thin layer of concrete, plaster, and paint.

As she drifted to sleep, she heard the occasional creak of his metal springs as he shifted to get comfortable despite the restraints.

In the middle of the night, even in her dreams, she heard his screams.

The pain had begun.

She had thrown off her thin blankets and was swiping her access card on his door before the sluggishness of sleep had left her limbs. The scene to which she entered was from her darkest of dreams. Edward was writhing in a sliver of moonlight like a werewolf undergoing its grotesque change. The bars of his window cast bizarre, striped shadows on his contorting limbs, which strained and flailed against the thick straps that bound him. He shook his head wildly as he screamed wordlessly for mercy.

Bella stood over him indecisively for several frenetic moments, trying futilely to capture his attention. "Edward! I'm here. I'm here, Edward. You're not alone. Edward!"

Despite the mantra of her voice and his name, the maelstrom continued, her words sucked under and drowned. She felt like she was standing over a merry-go-round spinning impossibly fast, a small boy stuck between its bars, wailing for her help; he wants to get off, he's getting too dizzy and sick, make it stop.

But she was afraid to reach out and grab the boy lest she also get sucked under and drowned. Edward's fists pummeled the blankets and his thighs and anything else they could reach. If she didn't do something, and soon, he was going to hurt himself.

Finally, she took a deep breath and plunged both hands into the fray, willing to get hurt if it meant he wouldn't.

For a second, she grappled with his wiry forearms, her torso pressed almost entirely against his as she tried to use her meager weight to restrain his thrashing. When she caught one of his flying fists in the jaw, she sagged against him, dazed and breathing heavily.

Through eyes stinging with unbidden tears, she realized that he had gone still.

She blinked to see that her hair had fallen into his face, and he was breathing deeply, his nostrils trembling as if savoring an exquisite flower or the finest wine. She didn't know if he found the scent of her shampoo soothing or if he'd finally realized who she was. Either way, she had somehow coaxed the lost lamb to where it would be safe from the claws of the marauding lion. The limbs of this lamb still quivered under her touch, his eyes darting fitfully beneath his closed eyelids, but he seemed calm—for now.

Alas, Bella wasn't the only one to have been alerted by Edward's screams. A nurse in white scrubs flipped on the light and jumped when she saw Bella's unexpected shape lying on the bed next to Edward.

"You shouldn't be touching him," the nurse cautioned, reaching for Bella's arm to help her up and away. "He's dangerous when he's like this."

"Wait," Bella began, trying to explain. "I think…"

She didn't finish. As the nurse grabbed Bella's arm, Edward showed just how dangerous he could be. His eyes flew open, pale yellow under the harsh fluorescence, and he struck at the nurse like a cobra, his pointed teeth snapping ineffectually a hair's breadth from her arm.

Although Edward missed the nurse, the force of his outburst knocked Bella away from her already precarious position on the bed. She fell heavily into a nearby cart laden with supplies, many of which had pointy edges that dug uncomfortably into her skin.

She landed on the floor and fought to regain the breath that had been yanked out from under her like a rug. Pain eventually filtered through her ragged breathing, and she looked down to see that a deep cut was weeping tears of blood down her arm.

Edward continued to arch against his restraints and showed every sign of working himself into a rabid rage. Looking steadily at the nurse, Bella slowly approached Edward and put a hand on his thrashing shoulder, leaning in to let her hair cascade over the skin of his arm like drizzled silk. At the feel of her hand or her hair—she couldn't tell which—he exhaled shakily once, like he was exorcising his demons, and sank back into the mattress. He remained frozen under her touch, his pain-numbed gaze staring balefully at the ceiling.

On her part, the nurse stared at Bella like she had just tamed a wild brumby in the Australian outback.

After that incident, no one else protested Bella's proximity to Edward. The nurse tended Bella's wounded arm carefully while Bella's other arm remained pressed against Edward's. They even pulled in a cot for her so that she could grab what sleep she could when he was quiet.

Over the ensuing days, Bella fulfilled her promise. She stayed with Edward in his little cell while he underwent trial by fire. She rotated damp cloths on his forehead. She gently traced the prominent veins from the tips of his fingers to the crook of his forearm. She read to him from her favorite books—like he was in the womb and her voice could soothe, could help him know her, could help increase his potential.

She stayed with him even when her presence wasn't enough to silence his screams.

At dawn on the fourth day, Edward stirred as the sun rose on his face, his slow movements a deep pond rippled by the merest of breezes. When his swollen eyes cracked open, he blearily surveyed the room until he found Bella's face only a few inches from his.

"Miss Bella," he croaked through lips, tongue, and throat parched with a lack of liquid—and the screaming. "I'm sorry if I hurt you when I was sick. I didn't mean to."

The sound of his voice broke something inside of her. For the first time since the ordeal began, Bella started to cry.

"Why are you crying?" Edward asked, but she couldn't answer.

She was crying because, despite everything he'd been through over the past several weeks, his first request was not for food or water—it was for her forgiveness. She was crying because, contrary to what Dr. Jenks had hoped, Edward had obviously been lucid enough during his pain to have remembered hurting her.

"I never meant to make you cry," Edward said, his brow furrowed with worry, and she smiled at him the best she could through her tears.

They waited two more weeks.

Those two weeks, Bella slowly picked up her life like bedding cast to the floor during a nightmare. She returned Jacob and Charlie's calls. She promised them that she'd be home for Christmas. She robotically took notes during classes and did homework in her apartment and aced all her tests.

But after two weeks, Edward's intelligence continued to flatline like the heart monitor of a patient who had recently passed. Eventually, they said he was free to go back to his life. Dr. Jenks and his team had given up on him at last.

When she heard the news, Bella marched into Dr. Jenks' office and shut the door a little too firmly.

"You can't just let him go," she said between clenched teeth.

Dr. Jenks looked up at her in surprise. "The treatment didn't work."

"What if it's just taking longer than normal?"

"We will, of course, monitor his condition at least once a week over the next several months. But there's nothing else we can do."

"Has this happened before? On any of the animals, I mean. Did any of them fail to react to the treatment?"

"Occasionally. In only a small percentage of the cases. And each time, we had to let the animals go. We found loving homes for them where possible."

Edward didn't have a loving home to go back to. Bella shuddered to think what the caveat of "where possible" had meant for some of those innocent animals.

"We need to let him go, let him get back to his life. _You_ need to let him go."

But Bella couldn't.

She couldn't let go of Edward Cullen.

Not yet.

She'd given him too much of herself to just walk away. If she walked away now, she'd be leaving her heart behind.

The day of his release, Bella watched Edward step into atypical sunlight, the first time his flesh had been exposed to the sun for weeks. His skin was so pale that it almost seemed to glow, to sparkle with iridescent pinpricks of his sweat. When he walked away from the compound, Bella didn't let him walk away alone.

* * *

While Edward forgot his stay in the lab as readily as he dismissed a bad dream, Bella was not so lucky. She could not soon forget the deep bruises under Edward's eyes, his limbs and teeth slashing and thrashing, the muscles in his neck straining until they nearly snapped. She could not forget the sound of his feeble groans or his quiet sobs into his pillow.

She looked at him now and saw his pain-haunted face. She still heard his screams. Yet it had all been for nothing.

Nothing.

In the time she had known him, Bella's world had expanded in all directions, like pancake batter poured on a hot griddle. No longer was she so focused on the appearance of her own feet. She saw the people around her—really saw them—and wondered about their lives, their passions, their history.

Their pain.

She had weathered the fire of Edward's torment and had not come away unscathed.

Edward, however, shook off those nightmarish days as easily as slipping off a choke collar. He went back to work immediately.

"They need me," he said, chastising her gently when she questioned his decision. She didn't have the heart to tell him that his employers had probably not even truly registered his absence. To them, he was no more than a single fallen apple in an orchard full of other, shinier apples still growing ripe on a limb. They wouldn't notice if he were trampled underfoot and eaten by worms.

"Oh look, Eddie's back," Mike said from the circulation counter, rolling his eyes, perhaps because he was the one who had to re-shelve the books after Edward made the initial attempt. "Welcome back, Bella."

Bella rolled her own eyes and did not acknowledge Mike's greeting, although Edward did. Bella made the Seattle public library her second home, spending at least three days a week sitting with Edward throughout his morning shift when classes and homework permitted.

She sat and lost herself in classic tales of love and loss, of sorrow and redemption. Sometimes she sat with Edward in the aisle where he worked, watching his painful progress down never-ending rows of books he would never read. Sometimes she sat nearby and just watched him, listened to him tell her the same stories, over and over, a broken record spinning forever on a decrepit phonograph in a corner.

She watched how he maintained an unchanging quality of work, day in and day out. While Mike and the other library workers slacked off or cut out early, Edward never shirked his duties. Each day, he walked down the same aisles. He re-shelved the same number of books.

He was forever unchanging, but he had forever changed her.

She'd given so much of herself, but Edward could never give back. She watched, but the watching increasingly pained her. She could feel herself expanding, learning, growing, leaving him behind.

As time passed, the three days a week she spent with him became two.

Then one.

As with most students, the juggernaut pressures of her graduate program began to weigh on her toward the end of the semester. She juggled the rapidly converging pressures of homework, papers, and exams. She continued helping Dr. Jenks collect and assemble data related to Alice's remarkable progress.

Edward began slipping from her like a childhood friend who does not follow you into adulthood. She felt herself slipping away, and she let it happen.

Maybe he wouldn't even notice.


	9. Birthday boy

Important note:

This chapter contains the first of several reasons why this story is rated M for mature. This chapter also contains the first EPOV scenes. Coincidence? I think not. Edward's life isn't as…pretty…as Bella's. You'll see why.

* * *

When Miss Bella stopped coming to see him, Edward noticed.

He noticed, but he didn't blame her one bit. He could understand why she had left. They had tested him, they had given him some medicine, and he had failed. Like Alice had shown him, he didn't deserve to be friends with someone as smart as Bella. Bella was even smarter than Alice. He had probably been a bad friend to her. Even though he tried, he couldn't really talk to her about smart things.

So he understood if she was too busy to see him now. But he couldn't help but miss her.

He missed the way her brown eyes looked at him whenever he spoke. He missed her calm voice and the patient way that she would explain things to him until he understood. He missed the way that she made him feel—like he had something to give.

Like he wasn't alone.

Before, he hadn't really noticed that he was alone. He had his bus buddies and his work buddies. But when he no longer had Miss Bella, he found that he was not only alone—he was lonely. The book stacks had never seemed so empty, the beach never so desolate. Sometimes, he would start telling a story, only to look over and find that he had nothing but an audience of air.

At least he had Emmett, who was the best cook in the world and who still had a big smile for him each day.

And at least he had Mister Mike.

Mister Mike was one of his bestest friends. Mister Mike hung out with him at the library and laughed with him and told him funny jokes. So when it was his birthday, Edward of course told Mister Mike. He had to look very hard to find Mister Mike, but he finally found him in one of the empty reading rooms in the back of the library with Miss Jessica, one of their new co-workers.

He found them because they were making a lot of noise and because he could see the outlines of their bodies wiggling against the frosted glass.

"Today is my birthday," Edward announced after he'd opened the door. Mister Mike jumped back from Miss Jessica, as though Edward had just yelled in his ear.

"Geez, Edward, you scared me," Mister Mike said with his hand over his heart. Beside him, Miss Jessica pulled on her clothes and giggled a little. They looked at each other and talked quickly for a while, saying words that Edward didn't quite understand. He listened and waited for them to talk to him again.

When Edward interrupted them in a potentially compromising position, Mike knew that he needed to say something funny to save face with Jessica. "You know Special Ed is back when he interrupts your nookie to tell you about the day he came out of a vagina."

Jessica laughed her nasally laugh; she loved it when Mike with his little angel face was crude. "Maybe he just wants back in a vagina." She looked at Edward contemplatively, and Mike didn't like the way that her gaze lingered. It reminded him of the fact that Bella's gaze had also lingered on Edward.

Mike snorted. "Wouldn't you be afraid of getting cooties or something?"

"What are we, second graders?" Jessica said. "Personally, I think that he'd be excellent. He seems eager to please."

Jessica continued inspecting Edward like prime beef. "What do you think, Edward?"

"About what, Miss Jessica?" Edward responded politely. He had been watching her as she and Mister Mike had their private talk time, and he noticed that she looked and moved nothing like Miss Bella. Miss Bella never looked at him in a way that made him uncomfortable.

"Would you do something for me?" Jessica asked, giving Edward her best kitten eyes.

"No way," Mike interrupted before Edward could readily agree. "I'm not gonna be part of a retard sandwich."

"You know what they say," Jessica drawled, her eyes never leaving Edward's face. "It only takes two to tango."

"But…what…do you…" Mike spluttered, his eyes bugging at her implication.

"Gosh, Mike, I'm just kidding," Jessica said, looking at him like he was as stupid as Edward. "I make it a point not to date guys who can't even spell their own name." But her eyes still glinted when she looked back at Edward. "Listen, I've gotta get to work before my boss gets in, so this party is over."

Mike watched how Jessica's body and hands touched Edward a little too much as she dramatically squeezed by him. Edward seemed not to notice.

"How about tonight we pick up where we left off?" Mike called after her.

"Okay. On one condition—bring Edward." Jessica smirked at him before walking away, her heels clickety-clacking on the concrete floors.

Mike stood in the middle of the reading room, frustrated on several levels and wondering what was so wrong with him that the girls he liked were inevitably attracted to Edward Cullen, of all people. It certainly couldn't be Edward's face. Or his voice. Maybe it was his weird smell.

"I'm sorry that Miss Jessica had to go," Edward said, trying to understand the sadness he saw in Mister Mike's face.

Mister Mike just looked at him for a second and then seemed to make up his mind about something. "Meet me in front of the library tonight at nine p.m. I'm going to take you out for your birthday."

"Thanks, Mister Mike!" Edward said but then frowned when he remembered something. "That's past my bed time."

"C'mon Edward, it's your birthday! We have to celebrate. Get you loosened up some."

"Okay," Edward agreed doubtfully, although he trusted Mister Mike. "I'll see you tonight!"

* * *

This was going to be his best birthday ever.

Edward couldn't remember the last time he'd had a birthday party with people. Now, not only was Mister Mike going to have a party with him, but Edward found that Mister Mike had even brought some friends, including Miss Jessica.

"Mister Mike," Edward said in greeting. Several of Mister Mike's friends looked at him, and they smiled funny, showing their teeth like unfriendly dogs.

"Uh, Edward," Mister Mike said, stepping over to him and lowering his voice. "Call me Mike. You only need to call me Mister Mike at work."

"Okay…Mist…Mike," Edward agreed.

"Mike," Jessica whined, "why won't you tell me where we're going?"

"Because it's a surprise," Mike said. "A surprise party for Edward."

Mike led their little pack around street corners that Edward rarely turned. In the dark, the streets looked even more frightening than they did during the day. Edward was glad that Mike and his friends were there to protect him. They stopped in front of an ominous black door that looked like the gates of hell. Edward could even see the fire dancing inside.

"You've brought us to a gentleman's club?" Jessica said. She sounded skeptical and bored.

"It'll be fun," Mike said. "It's Edward's birthday, and I'm sure he's a whatever-year-old virgin. He's probably never been to a gentleman's club. We're initiating him into manhood here."

Mike knew enough about Jessica to know that she was all about corrupting the innocent; this little mission should be right up her alley. Plus, this little "party" would help kill two birds with one stone—first, by the time Mike was done with him, Edward couldn't possibly be perceived as a sex object; second, he'd learned from his extensive research in the Human Sexuality section of the library that women were just as likely to get in the mood at a gentleman's club as were the gentlemen.

Mike gave everyone a big smile and gestured that they should follow. The bouncer at the door was in Mike's weight-lifting elective; he gave Mike a fist-bump and didn't even card them. Just his luck, Edward wouldn't have identification on him.

Edward smiled nervously and followed Mike and his friends into the building. The cacophony of noise and lights and smells assaulted his senses immediately, and he felt disoriented, like someone had thrown a bucket of water on his face. But he struggled through the feeling, focusing on the back of Mike's head and faithfully following it as it moved through the maze of people and tables. Mike led him to a table near a wall and pointed him to a chair. Edward obediently sat and watched as Mike ordered drinks. After a moment, Edward noticed that Jessica had sat right between him and Mike; her chair was uncomfortably close.

For a while, he focused on the little sphere that was their table. He smiled and watched as Mike and his friends looked around and told funny jokes, mostly about girls. Edward laughed when they laughed and drank when they drank.

At first, he hadn't wanted to drink the juice that Mike had ordered for him. It smelled funny. But when Mike told him to "Drink up, Edward. It's your birthday," he smiled and did what his friend Mike said. The grape juice in his glass didn't taste good and made his eyes tear up, but it was the same as that in his friends' glasses, so he was content.

He drank and counted the number of times his glass was magically refilled when he wasn't looking—four. After a while, something shiny nearby caught his eye. It was a silver pole set up in the middle of a stage. He watched the lights gleaming off the pole until he noticed that someone was climbing it—a girl. She climbed up and spun down and down.

Something about the way the girl was moving made him nervous and hot, so he focused on his glass and took a long drink of his cold juice. Mike noticed his swig and started chanting "Chug, chug, chug!" Edward drank down the rest of his glass, smacking his lips and grinning at Mike because he knew that always got a laugh.

Despite himself, Edward couldn't keep his eyes away from the girl on the mesmerizing pole. She looked a little like Miss Bella with her brown hair and brown eyes. But he didn't think Miss Bella would ever be doing what this girl was doing. He looked back at her and froze when his hazy thoughts informed him that there was something very wrong.

She didn't have any clothes on.

As soon as he realized this, he pushed his chair back and stood up.

"Whoa, buddy," Mike said as he held out a hand to steady him. For some reason, the ground was moving. "Where you going?"

He tried to answer Mike, but his tongue felt three times too big. Instead of trying to talk, he moved toward the girl that looked like Miss Bella. When he stood close enough and had fought with his feet to remain stationary, he shrugged out of his jacket.

"'Scuse me, miss," he said loudly. Many of the nearby patrons leered at him, but he was too focused on the girl's deep brown eyes to notice. Those eyes widened when she took in his appearance, but she was a professional and would not turn down a potential customer, no matter how odd. She pranced to stand closer to him.

"You look…c-cold," he stammered at her nearness. Her body seemed to be radiating the heat of the sun. He held out his jacket to her. He didn't need it because he was too warm.

The girl looked at his offering for a second.

"Kinky," she purred. "I like it."

Edward didn't know what that word meant, but he smiled at her, hoping that she would cover herself up now.

She didn't.

Instead, she took his jacket and began using it as a towel.

Behind him, Edward could hear Mike and Jessica hooting and hollering his name. They sounded encouraging, and he hoped they were asking the girl to put on his jacket. When she instead started rubbing it between her legs, riding it like she sat in a swing sideways, Edward backed up and stumbled to his table, his eyes wide.

"Dude," Mike said, "she's supposed to give _you_ a present, not the other way around."

Edward could only groan in response. Every move he made felt sluggish, and he felt even less smart than normal. He slumped in his chair and drank when Mike told him to. He felt Jessica's hand on his knee, but he couldn't seem to think of how to tell her that he didn't really like being touched. Her palm felt warm, and it was burning a path up his leg, like she was rubbing him with hot oil.

"He's so wasted," Mike crooned to his buddies, and they all laughed. Edward smiled, and his eyes crossed, which made everyone laugh harder. He was the funniest he'd ever been.

Later, Mike said, "You're ready for your present now." He waved a hand, and Edward wondered vaguely what was going to magically appear now.

It was his jacket. It floated toward him from the stage, and the plaid lines seemed to dance as they got closer. He smiled widely when he realized that the jacket wasn't really floating. It was being worn by the girl from before. She was coming to show him that she'd put it on and wasn't cold any more.

Then his jacket was right in front of him. He grinned at it and watched in rapture as the girl's fingers tugged at the top button. Everything else faded; the sounds of laughter, the music, the buzz of conversation. His grin faltered as the girl's hands undid the first button. Then the next.

He suddenly felt a weight on his legs and looked down to see the girl was sitting on his lap, her legs spread apart. She didn't have any pants on. Luckily, her girl place was hidden by the hem of his jacket.

And he was so very, very hot. The heat he'd felt from her before was nearly melting him now that she was so close.

When he raised his heavy head again, he saw that she had opened many of the buttons already. She was very fast. Much faster than he was. He could see a trail of skin from her neck to the middle of the jacket.

His pants started to feel increasingly tight.

He carefully watched the progress of her fingers until she reached the very bottom of his jacket. Her fingertips lightly grazed the fabric of his tented pants as she worked the last button, and he felt himself surge _down there_ in response.

_This was wrong._

"Nuh…" he slurred but couldn't push out any more words.

In one fluid motion, the girl parted his jacket like the Red Sea in the Bible pictures his mama used to show him, and the girl's naked chest was staring him in the face.

_This was very wrong. _

But he couldn't look away. Her lady parts were _right there_ and their soft movement was hypnotizing as she swayed slightly above him.

Then she started to wiggle on his lap like a puppy, and he threw back his head at the sensation.

It felt wrong but yet good and the world was spinning and he was pushing away from her and his chair felt to the ground behind him and he couldn't find the exit through all the laughing and pointing people.

"Where you goin', buddy?" Mike called out.

"That was so hot," Jessica said.

A strong man helped him walk and pushed him out of the gates of Hell. The cool air felt good on his flushed face and he took deep breaths of it to help calm his breathing. His world was spinning, spinning so fast that he couldn't figure out which way was home.

He stumbled toward the only landmark he recognized, the Martian-looking tower that rose before him in the night.

* * *

The shrill ring of her cell phone woke Bella. She blearily noted the time—two a.m.—and fumbled for the phone.

"Hello?"

"Miss Bella?" someone said. The words were so slurred they were barely recognizable, but only one person called her that.

"Edward?" she said, sitting up straighter in her bed and pulling the phone closer to her ear. She hadn't spoken to Edward in over a week. And he had never called her before.

She knew something had to be wrong.

"I need…" Bella grew chilled when the next words he spoke were unintelligible. He sounded like he was sick. Immediately, Bella wondered if the treatment had worked after all, just not in the way expected. Maybe Edward had experienced a delayed reaction and was now writhing alone in his apartment.

"Edward, are you okay?"

He made a noise that did not sound affirmative, which only strengthened Bella's fear.

"Where are you?"

He was silent for a long time. Bella waited, biting her cheek to give him time to answer. If, in fact, he hadn't passed out.

"I'm…under the big…stace power."

Stace power? He must mean the space tower—the space needle was only a few blocks away. Although why Edward was so far from his apartment this late at night she didn't know.

"I'm coming. Hold on."

Not waiting for a reply, she slung on her coat, wrestled her galoshes onto her feet, and was out the door in less than a minute.

The sky began to drizzle as she hit the streets and fairly ran toward the space needle. In the darkness, the familiar streets were disguised with menacing shadows; she jumped at the occasional flare of seemingly floating cigarette butts in dark corners; the trees waved leafless branches toward her in silent warning.

As the space needle began to fill a large portion of her sky, she began scouring the area for Edward. Her heart nearly stopped when she saw him slumped against the dilapidated pay phone he had used to call her. His long legs were splayed out in front of him, as if he'd fallen where he stood, and he still clutched the phone in his hand.

"Edward," she called softly as she approached. His head lolled in her direction.

"Miss Bella," he slurred. His long hair straggled over his face, and it was quickly getting drenched in the soft yet persistent rain.

As she drew closer, Bella realized that this—whatever this was—was not a reaction to the treatment after all. She smelled pungent alcohol and saw that Edward had red stains down his gray t-shirt. And he wasn't wearing his jacket.

"Were you drinking?" she asked quietly, the retreating fear leaving her with nothing but anger, as she knelt down and tried to figure out the best way to lift him. She wasn't sure yet who she was angry at.

Edward's fuzzy eyes focused on her chin with great effort. "Yeah. Rotten grape juice."

If he didn't know what he'd been drinking, perhaps it hadn't been his choice to drink. She could only hope that he hadn't used the small stipend that he'd received from the study to drown his disappointment in alcohol.

Bella at last found purchase on his heavy limbs, and they staggered together like two winos to her street. They fell several times, scraping both their knees, and Edward stopped twice to vomit onto the sidewalk. Bella held his hair back each time and was grateful for the rain that helped wash away the foul-smelling present left for her neighbors.

When they arrived at her apartment, she negotiated with his limbs and eventually managed to sprawl his body on the toilet.

As she helped him take off his fouled shirt, she saw Edward was crying. The tears ran down his face silently, his lips trembling with their passing. But he continued smiling at her with his cloudy gaze despite the discomfort she knew he must feel.

"Why did you go out tonight?" she asked to distract him from the movement of her hands at his belt.

"Mike…gave present…Birthday Boy…" His mumbled words hit only the highlights of his evening, but they were enough. Hearing Mike's name sent a stalactite of hot fury through the ceiling of her chest cavity. And to think that she'd felt guilty for not ever taking Mike up on his offer to get coffee. He clearly wasn't worth knowing if he'd purposefully gotten this innocent man roaring drunk and then discarded him on the streets of Seattle like a bedraggled kitten.

Some birthday present.

She hadn't even known it was his birthday.

Edward's head rested on the wall, and his heavy eyes watched her slow progress with his clothes. Occasionally, his eyes lolled back in to his head, like he was going to pass out, reminding her too closely of those horrific three days she'd spent with him during the treatment.

She shimmied off his dingy shoes and socks, then his pants, doing her best to keep her eyes averted from his white briefs, which probably would reveal more than she wanted to see.

"Can you shower yourself?" she asked. Edward nodded solemnly and promptly slid off the toilet like water down a slide when he tried to stand up.

She eventually maneuvered him into the small shower and propped him up against the tile as the warm water cascaded around him. When she let go of him briefly to reach for the shampoo, he slid down the wall and curled up, his body shaking with gasping sobs. He mumbled something about skin and wrong and dirty, and Bella wondered where, exactly, Mike had taken him.

She hunkered down and washed and rinsed everything she could reach, taking special care to clean the vomit on his arms and hands. When she finished and turned off the spray, Edward sat and shook while she opened a nearby cabinet to retrieve a fresh towel. She wrapped him in the biggest white towel she had and pulled him toward her bedroom after a brief pit stop in which she eyed her tiny futon and decided it was too small for his lanky frame. A trail of wet footprints marked their passage to her bed.

"Edward, please put these on," she said, pulling out her largest pair of cutoff sweatpants.

After she left Edward cocooned in her bed, his damp hair combed away from his face, his knees swabbed with Neosporin, and her cleaning bucket by the bed, she carried his sopping clothes to the washer.

In the pockets of his khakis, she found his Velcro wallet and a single apartment key. After she'd thrown in his clothes and started the load, Bella looked down at the wallet. For old time's sake, she decided to open it. Her fingers skimmed the edges of its familiar items until she noticed something new peeking out from the first pocket.

She pulled out a thick piece of smooth paper and unfolded it to find that Edward had his own Polaroid—of her. She'd apparently not noticed that the same lab technician who had snapped the picture of Edward by her bed had also snapped one of her.

As far as pictures of her went, this one was some of her better work. She looked completely at ease, smiling, eyes alight. Of course, that could be because she had not been aware that the picture was being taken. She was not even looking at the camera.

She had been looking at Edward. She had been watching him as he recounted his vivid dream about being a real boy. Flipping the picture over, Bella saw that Edward had scribbled her cell phone number, likely in one of the earlier days of their acquaintance in which she'd dictated it to him "for emergencies." Above the cell number, in those scrawled, childish letters that she recognized from the reference card in his wallet, were the words "My frend."

Tonight had been an emergency, and so he had called his friend.

She wondered idly if Edward had asked for the picture or if the technician had merely given it to him. She also thought about the fact that the technician had taken separate pictures—not one of them together.

Symbolism, perhaps?

Edward was never going to be a "real" boy. Her friendship with him could never be real. If anything, her presence in his life seemed to have made it worse. She wouldn't doubt that the jealousy she'd often seen in Mike's eyes played a starring role in this little birthday coup that Mike had orchestrated.

Bella fell into a fitful sleep on the futon, lulled into dreams at last by the sound of the dryer.


	10. Rainbows after storms

"Who the blazes are you?!"

Bella awoke instantly, the harsh shout surging adrenaline through her body more effectively than any alarm clock. She sat up quickly from the futon, her muscles protesting their irregular sleep position.

"Answer me!" the voice said from the other room, and Bella finally recognized it as Jake's. "What are you doing in my girlfriend's bed?"

A better question would be: What was Jake doing in her apartment?

In their five years of dating, Bella and Jake had had their share of arguments. They were both the only child of a single father; they were independent, headstrong, and unused to adapting their behavior to people their own age. They quickly learned that allowing a confrontation to escalate to an all-out fight resulted in days or weeks of silence, usually until Bella baked Jake his favorite cookies as a peace offering.

As Bella entered her bedroom, she saw from the tight lines of Jake's body that he was past the point of no return, like a boulder that had been slowly tipped from its resting place at the top of a hill, poised to wreak havoc. Looking past him, she saw Edward cowered against her bed frame, his hair matted oddly to one side and her bedcovers pulled up to his neck as if to ward off the mad apparition in front of him.

Sensing her, Jake whirled, his eyes made fierce with fear—probably for her safety—looking every inch a Quileute warrior protecting his tribe. She was shocked to see that time had worked unexpected magic on his body—he had filled out since she last saw him, and she could see the muscles bunched protectively in his chest and neck. She hardly recognized him.

But the look on his face—_that_, she recognized.

When his dark eyes raked over her revealing camisole and boxers, his expression churned with surprise and hurt before finally settling on a steely anger. Now that he had gotten over his fear that the strange man in front of him had done something to Bella, his eyes glowed like hot coals.

In her haste to retrieve Edward yesterday, Bella had done no more than throw on an overcoat and shoes over her normal sleepwear. She could only imagine what the situation must look like to Jake.

"It's not what it looks like," she said, feeling unexpectedly defensive under the weight of this uber-Jake's stare.

"Really? I think it's _exactly_ what it looks like." His light tone did little to mask the raging river below the surface. Others might be fooled, but she knew him too well.

She glanced at Edward, giving him a wordless apology that did not penetrate his contorted expression, then grabbed Jake's arm—her fingers couldn't even wrap halfway around his bicep!—and pulled him to the living room, where they could have this conversation in private. Edward might not understand the reason, but he would not miss the vitriol in Jake's voice.

Bella planted herself in the middle of the living room and crossed her arms. "That's Edward," she said simply, as though those two words would explain everything.

At the name, however, Jake's eyes flashed. "Edward," he repeated, spitting out the word as though it was rotten meat. "I thought the treatment didn't work. Why is he here?"

"He needed my help last night. We're sorta friends. It's no big deal."

"Friends?" Jake said in disbelief. "I thought you said this guy was mentally retarded."

Bella hadn't thought of Edward in those terms for so long that she was surprised to hear Jake say the words. "He is."

She hoped that Edward wasn't listening and that he couldn't understand even if he was.

"Is a retard even capable of being friends?"

"Yes, he is," she said, raising her chin defiantly, even though Edward could never be the friend she needed.

"Don't you think it was dangerous to bring him home like a lost puppy? He could hurt you without even realizing it."

Bella knew that Jake meant well, that he was only looking out for her—but he _knew_ that she hated it when he acted like she was a china doll. She felt her own ire rise like goosebumps on her arm.

"Don't you think I know what I'm doing? I've spent a lot of time with him. He doesn't hurt people. He's the most kind, gentle person I know."

Jake looked down, his eyes closing briefly as if in preparation for something. Bella knew instinctively that she wouldn't like what was coming next.

Jake slowly opened his eyes and looked at her with the intense gaze of a predator. "You've been distant for months. You've been ignoring my calls, have been too busy to even text me back, and now I find that you've had enough time to tuck another kind, gentle guy into your bed?"

"Jake, it's really not like that—"

"What, is he your fucktard now?"

The derogatory term hit her with the force of a battering ram, pushing the rational explanation about Edward's presence out of her mind.

"Don't you _ever_ call Edward that again," she hissed. "I would never take advantage of him that way."

As he had done so often over the past five years, Jake matched her fury for fury, surging forward and gripping her forearms, his fingernails leaving crescents in her flesh.

"Are you defending him now?" he growled, shaking her once. "That's rich. I haven't seen you in months, and I drive four hours to spend the weekend with you—"

He cut off with a grunt as something slammed into him from the side in a flurry of knees and elbows. Bella was shocked to see that the wild creature was Edward, who had apparently interpreted Jake's body language as threatening to Bella.

"Get off me, dude!" Jake said, his arms in front of his face to ward off the flying fists. Edward merely gave a strangled cry and kept up a whirlwind of ineffectual punches that did little physical damage but that would inevitably cause an emotional storm. Bella watched the fury build in Jake's face like a white-crested breaker surging toward sand.

Edward never had a chance.

"Jacob…" she warned, using his full name, which he hated. She spoke it too late. In one fluid movement—the wave descending forcefully at last—Jake's fist darted out and connected with Edward's face in a sickening, wet crunch.

Edward fell like a soundless tree in the forest and lay with his eyelashes fluttering above deadened, bloodshot eyes. Bella stood for only a few beats of her heart before moving to crouch over Edward, her hands cushioning his head. Without thinking twice, she had made a choice about the man she would stand behind.

She knew what she had done; Jake knew what she had done; the only one who didn't know was the one for whom she had done it. For a moment, the room was filled with nothing more than Jake's harsh breathing and Edward's sniffling.

"Get out," Bella said, looking down at the floor at Jake's overlarge feet. She knew that if she looked into his face, she would see shame, and her resolve might soften.

She didn't look at his face.

"Bella, I didn't mean—"

"Get out, Jacob," she said, more forcefully this time as she helped Edward to a sitting position. The silence stretched as Jake debated whether to leave her here alone with Edward. She knew that every touch she pressed against Edward's face and his bare shoulder branded Jake's heart.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt him." But his sulky tone belied his words.

"You hit an innocent, a man with the mind of a child."

Now it was his turn to be defensive. "He attacked _me_."

"It does not matter." She paused for a second and sucked in a breath, knowing that what she was about to say would hurt him to his core. "You might as well have hit me."

She looked up as she said the words, just in time to see Jake take a step back, his face heavy with implication. Just in time to watch the death of their hopes and dreams in Jake's dark irises eyes —dreams of their wedding in the sands of First Beach, their long and happy life together, their matching rocking chairs on the porch of a house built by his hands.

When they had first started dating, they'd promised never to hit each other. No matter the anger, no matter the situation, they'd agreed that physical violence was the unforgivable sin that would doom their relationship to failure.

Jake had crossed that line.

Now, he was a desperate man.

"Bella, I would _never_ hit you."

"You grabbed me. You shook me."

"Bella, please…"

"No."

His next words were soft but sharp, razors slicing deeper into her heart. "You're throwing away everything we've had, everything we _are_, so that you can be a tardkeeper?"

"Where are you getting these terrible words?" Bella whispered, shocked at the ugliness coming from his honey lips; the dark, sticky hatred seeping from his eyes of coal; his large fists clenched as if to hit again.

This was the boy she'd known since they were in diapers, the boy in whose arms she'd cried after being mercilessly teased in eighth grade, the boy whose lips she'd first kissed, the boy who wrote her cheesy poems every Valentine's day, the boy who knew everything about her—how to make her laugh, cry, sigh, and everything in between.

Yet this man, this person standing before her, was nothing like the boy she had known. The boy she had known was her friend, her confidant, her lover. This man was her enemy, twisting his knowledge of her to make her _hurt_.

Jake laughed mirthlessly, baring his teeth like a wolf, further distancing himself from any semblance of the boy she had known. "Quil and Embry aren't as open-minded as I am about what you do. They joke constantly about your 'patients.'"

"You don't sound open-minded to me."

"Whatever, _Isabella_," he sneered, using the full name that she hated he use. "I'm done defending you to everyone. I hope you'll be very happy with this _person_," he fairly spat the word at Edward, "who is incapable of being your friend."

Then he was gone, something small and metallic clattering harshly in his wake. Bella slumped against the edge of the futon, staring for a moment at the silver key to her apartment pointing at her accusingly from the hardwood floor.

She didn't even know Jake had a key.

The merest of sounds—a single sniff—pulled her back from the brink of a crushing despair and reminded her that she wasn't alone. Bella looked over to see blood dripping from Edward's face and hands; in his effort to stem the crimson tide, he was smearing it ineffectually across his skin like a child's finger painting. With a gasp, she ripped tissues from a nearby box and started the process of cleaning his flesh for the second time in twenty-four hours, flesh that had been marred both times through the cruelty of his peers—no fault of his own.

And for the second time, she felt like weeping.

While Bella tended his injury, gently wiping away the visible traces of violence on the apple of his cheek, Edward's soft gaze darted restlessly around her face, never catching her eye but occasionally focusing on her hair, her mouth, and the freckle on her neck, his pupils dilating minutely with each fleeting glance. As always, she wondered what he was thinking, what he was feeling, what he saw when he looked at her. He seemed to be looking for something in her face, but she didn't know what that could possibly be.

After securing two wads of tissue in his nostrils to dam the flow of blood, Bella sat frozen on her futon. The enormity of what had just happened swelled around her like a rip tide, threatening to suck her out into an endless sea.

Jake was her one constant—up until this moment, he had represented everything good in her life; he had been the yin to her yang, the sun to her moon. He was her past, and she had fully expected him to be her future. She used to joke with him that his perpetually happy aura drew people in, making it impossible for anyone to feel sad in his presence. But she also knew that all was not sunny skies with him; the storms they had weathered together were sometimes brutal. And today had been the worst storm of all, the kind that left the survivors battered and bruised, little—if any—left of their relationship to rebuild.

Bella felt movement at her feet and looked down in amazement to see Edward laying his head on her leg like a hound at its master's knee. As always, Edward somehow made the rainbow after the storm.

"I'm sorry he hurt you, Miss Bella," he said brokenly, carefully nuzzling his swollen nose into the soft skin of her leg.

"I'm sorry he hurt _you_," Bella echoed faintly. Hesitantly, she touched the crown of his head, attempting but failing to thread her fingers through his sleep-matted hair. She settled for stroking it on the surface, softly.

Like her fingers in his hair, their relationship would never do more than skim the surface. What she had told Jake was painfully true—Edward was a man with the mind of a child. But unlike a child, he would never grow up. The treatment had failed. And even if it hadn't, there had been no guarantee that Edward would ever go on to live a normal life—Alice continued to be living proof of that.

Jake was right. By choosing this path—even though it was the path that Edward walked—she would always be alone.

Bella spent the next hour collecting Edward's clothes from the dryer, giving him water and aspirin to help him recuperate, and walking him outside to ensure that he knew his way home.

When she came back inside, she found his Polaroid picture of her on the floor of the laundry, half-hidden under the dryer.

She almost ran after Edward to return it, so he could put it back in his wallet where it belonged. She'd scooped it up, slipped back into her shoes, and had thrown open her front door. But then something stopped her. Something prevented her from taking a step across the threshold.

Maybe it would be better if Edward didn't have this picture to remind him of a girl he once knew.

Maybe it was for the best.

Bella slowly closed her door.

* * *

When Bella went home to Forks for Christmas break, she felt anything but merry.

The final two weeks of the semester, she had continued the process of extricating Edward from her life like the remnants of ketchup in a bottle. She did not attend his weekly check-ins with Dr. Jenks' team. She avoided the library—and Mike. She knew that she should do something on the Mike front; she didn't know what. He hadn't broken any library rules by taking Edward out after hours. She couldn't prove that he'd helped Edward "celebrate" his birthday out of anything but good will.

She couldn't prove it—but she knew it.

And if Edward was the dregs of ketchup that you drained until you couldn't drain any more, Jake was soured milk poured immediately down the sink. They'd really, truly, broken things off. They didn't call. They didn't write. Jake had even blocked her as a friend on Facebook.

Despite the fact that she knew she'd made the right decision, she felt like a little red caboose that had broken from a train that she'd been following her whole life, a train that she had fully expected to follow forever. She now faced a solitary track stretching out infinitely alone through the wilderness—nothing and no one to guide her.

She'd gone to Seattle in part to find herself, but now found herself alone.

When Charlie picked her up from the airport and drove her through familiar streets, she noted that Forks looked smaller, dumpier, its people more lined and worn, its houses more decrepit. And the mud—she hadn't missed tracking in an acre of mud each time she stepped in her front door.

Her first meal back, which Charlie had offered to "cook" by ordering a pizza, she found that the Tag Team (as she and Jake had often dubbed their parents) were bursting with activities they could do as a "family" over the holidays.

When Charlie asked her how a camping trip up the Hoh River sounded, Bella responded honestly.

"Too awkward."

"Come on, we'll bring an air mattress for you," Charlie said, as if purposefully misunderstanding her. "You know my motto: Camping in Comfort."

"No, I mean, I think it will be too awkward…for me…and Jake."

Charlie stopped chewing mid-slice. "Come again?"

Charlie had not purposefully misunderstood her after all. From the comprehension she watched flood into his face, Bella realized that Jake had apparently neglected to inform the fathers about their recent separation. Her already sour mood nose-dived when she saw that Jake had set her up to be the bad guy, the bearer of the bad news that was sure to put a cramp in the Tag Team's Christmas style.

Surely Jake had known of the holiday plans, plans that clearly included Bella and Jake actively participating, together. Maybe he was in denial. Maybe he thought he was going to win her back. But she had told him long ago that she was not a prize to be won.

"We broke up," Bella said, as calmly as she could. She wondered how Jake had been able to hide the truth for the past two weeks. He'd always been such a bad liar, hardly able to hide a smile from his lips or eyes when he knew that he was even bending the truth. Perhaps their break up was one truth that it was easy for him to bend.

"What?" Charlie said, his eyes wide like she'd just told him that his baseball hero had taken steroids. The force of his reaction was as startling as an unexpectedly popped balloon.

"I broke up with him."

"When?"

"Two weeks ago. When you gave him my apartment key. When he came out to visit."

The next time they had spoken on the phone, Bella had learned that Charlie had leant Jake his extra key to her apartment so that Jake could surprise her. She was able to dance around the topic of their little "romantic rendezvous" easily; Charlie had already felt uncomfortable thinking about what he assumed had gone down.

She'd merely told him that the weekend had gone "fine" and then had laughed and asked Charlie if they were really going to talk about Jake.

Charlie remembered. "You said everything with Jake had gone fine."

"I didn't really feel comfortable talking about it yet."

They ate in silence for a few moments. Bella hoped Charlie would drop it, would retreat into his shell, finish his pizza, and then go call Billy to see if he'd known anything about this.

But Charlie eventually asked, "Do you think you're _done_ done?"

Bella put down the can of Coke that she'd been about to raise to her lips. "Is this your less than subtle way of telling me that I should get back together with Jake?"

Charlie squirmed a little in his seat at the direct question. "I'm not going to say that I didn't like seeing you two kids together. It was only natural. And it made our…non-traditional family a little easier than if you had hated each other."

Bella had known that the break-up would not only affect the two of them. Before she could say anything, Charlie continued.

"But I know my daughter. If you broke it off, you had a reason. I just hope it was the right reason."

Bella remembered the blood streaming down Edward's face like wax down a candle. She remembered his dazed eyes when his head hit the floor.

"Trust me, it was."

"Okay," Charlie said simply, and she thought that would be the end of it at last.

Then, "Was it because of Edward?" For once, Charlie had not called Edward "Edwin." He had not appended the word "character" as his last name.

"In a way," Bella answered honestly.

Charlie dropped his pizza in unexpected agitation.

"Bella…" Charlie began, then seemed to struggle for words, like a fisherman casting a net and coming up with too many fish to handle. "Bella, you need to think this through. Aren't you supposed to remain emotionally detached from these…patients…of yours?"

Guilt fisted Bella's stomach like clay. She had beaten herself over the head with this same argument a thousand times. Yet the words were more difficult to take when said out loud by someone else, particularly by someone who only voiced his opinion when it really mattered.

"This had nothing to do with my emotional state."

"Uh huh," Charlie said with the barest hint of sarcasm.

Bella hadn't intended to ever tell a soul about what Jake had done. She didn't want to tell Charlie about the wild look in Jake's eye, his clenched fists, his bared teeth. But for whatever reason, Charlie was picking this battle, and this was one battle she was not willing to lose.

"Dad, Jake hit Edward."

"What? He didn't hurt you, did he?" Charlie's voice was low, dangerous. From the way Charlie had worded it, Bella couldn't be sure which "he" he meant.

"No. Jake was being aggressive, Edward tried to defend me, Jake knocked him to the ground. End of story."

Charlie frowned as if he couldn't picture the scene as Bella described it. But he said merely, "Alright."

Then he continued softly, "I know you don't think you deserved to get into that program. But I haven't seen you this focused on anything since—well—ever. It's not healthy. And to be focused on helping someone who…"

Bella looked away, and Charlie didn't finish the sentence.

"Bella, the treatment didn't work."

"I know." She spoke more sharply than she had intended, and the harsh tone lingered in the silence like a camera's flash lingered on a retina.

Charlie didn't even know the half of it. Bella had leeched on to someone who could never give her what she needed. But—worse—her presence in his life was hurting Edward. Maybe if she hadn't always been around, rubbing it in Mike's face that she continued to chose Edward over him. Maybe if she hadn't pushed so hard to ensure that Edward was included in the study. Maybe if she hadn't filled Edward's soul with false hope that he might one day be a real boy.

In his own way, Charlie was right.

She needed to let Edward go.

* * *

Christmas was a quiet affair. The Tag Team was kind enough to allow Bella and Jake to stay home and lick their wounds in solitude. Bella had plenty of time to read, to write, to think.

To formulate a final plan.

The day before she was scheduled to return to Seattle for the start of her second semester, Bella slipped a letter into their mailbox and swiveled the little red flag into place.

The letter was addressed to the head administrator of the Seattle Central Library and contained a list of indiscretions that Bella had personally witnessed of one Mike Newton. The letter never once mentioned Edward Cullen (although it most certainly could have in relation to said indiscretions); instead, it listed a series of bullet points describing several incidents that Bella had observed during the time she spent with Edward at the library. She hadn't been the only young, attractive female that Mike had stalked through the stacks.

The strongly-worded letter would almost assuredly get Mike Newton fired.

The letter was her last gift to Edward, a belated Christmas present, albeit one that he'd never know she had given him. Bella could no longer give Edward the greatest gift of all—her time, her attention, her self—but at least she could ensure that there was one less person in Edward's life who would cause him pain.

Two—including her.


	11. Music maker

Edward had passed the window full of its glittering treasures too many times for him to count. He passed it on his daily field trip down to the water, on his way to sit and watch the toy ships and talk to the circling seagulls in their own, barking laugh. He passed the window again on the way back up the big hill, at the point where his legs were burning and telling him to stop.

Today, he passed the window, and something was different. Today, something stopped him. Today, he stepped inside for the first time. A friendly chime greeted him, and he looked up to watch the jingle bells above the door dancing merrily. It wasn't even Christmas yet.

A nice man emerged from some hidden doorway and stepped up to the counter.

"Can I help you?"

Edward smiled at the nice man, focusing on his mouth until he noticed the little bits of metal dotting the man's lip, eyebrow, and ears.

"I said," the nice man repeated, "can I help you?"

Edward snapped his focus away from the shiny metal embedded in the soft skin with effort.

"Yes," he said.

For a while, the man didn't say anything. Edward waited patiently for the man to speak because it was his turn. Maybe the man was just slow, like him. While he waited, Edward looked curiously at the man's thick, strong arms, which had dark writing and pictures all over them, like a messy chalkboard.

"Is there something particular you're looking for?" the nice man finally said. He sounded like he was in a hurry, as though he needed to go somewhere.

Fortunately, that was the question Edward needed. "Yes, a music maker."

"A music maker," the man repeated with a frown.

"Yeah."

"You're going to need to be a little more specific than that. I've got all kinds of things that make music, from eight-tracks to cymbals to…"

Edward could not follow the rest, but he stood and smiled politely as he always did when people started using big words he couldn't understand. He knew from experience that they would eventually slow down, would use the littler words that he could grab onto with two hands.

"Or maybe you're talking about something that will make the music of the spheres," the man said with a twisted smile, and he made some kind of pinching motion with his fingers. Edward finally recognized it as the movement made by people who smoke cigarettes.

"No," he said. He didn't like the smell of smoke. "I want that." He pointed to the music maker sitting by itself in a back corner—the same music maker that he had shown Miss Bella so long ago.

Turning his head to follow the direction of Edward's point, the man frowned. "Why didn't you just say so in the first place?"

Edward didn't know how to answer the question, so he didn't respond. If the man really needed an answer, he would ask again. They always did. Edward watched as the man pulled the keyboard from its lonely spot in the corner.

"Does it make pretty music?" Edward said, staring down at the gleaming white and black keys. His hands twitched, itching to touch them, but he closed his fingers into fists at his side. His mama had taught him to look but not touch. The music maker didn't belong to him. Not yet.

The nice man plugged the little black cord into a nearby wall. Edward watched carefully. He would have to do this himself next time. Next, the man pushed a big button at the top, and a little red light blinked on. The music maker had finally woken up after a long winter's nap.

"How much do I need to pay?" Edward asked.

"How much you got?"

Edward pulled out his wallet and counted down the bills carefully. He'd emptied out his piggy bank just this morning.

The nice man looked down at the money and said that he had just enough. Edward smiled and pushed the stack of twenties toward the man so that he would know he could take them. The bills were gone from the counter before Edward could even blink.

"Let me get you a box," the nice man said helpfully. He tucked the music maker carefully into the box, just like how Edward's mama used to tuck him into bed. He held the door of the shop open for Edward.

"Come back any time," the nice man said with a laugh. "You ever need anything, I will help you get it." When the door jingled shut, the man was still laughing.

Carrying the music maker was more difficult than Edward had expected. It was hard to walk and carry the box at the same time. It was not too heavy, but it was wide and long and didn't seem to want to sit still on his hip. Edward made his way home slowly, proud that he only dropped the box a couple of times. And one of those times didn't count, because it was knocked from his hands by someone else.

It took longer than usual for him to get on the bus because he had to figure out how to fit the box through the door.

"Stand it up straight, like a soldier," Mister Ben told him, the old black man who drove this bus. Mister Ben was his friend. Edward did what Mister Ben said.

The people on the bus looked at him and his music maker.

"I am going to make pretty music," he told them, and many of them laughed in delight.

But Mister Ben didn't laugh. Mister Ben looked sad, although he was looking in his big mirror at the other people, not at Edward. Edward had never understood why laughter made some people sad. Laughter followed him everywhere he went, and he was not sad.

Edward wrestled the box in through the narrow door of his apartment, this time remembering to stand it up straight like a proud little soldier.

He stood looking down at his little music-making machine. It sat in its new house, the new centerpiece of his living room, the bestest thing that he owned. He looked down at the music maker but, strangely, he thought of Miss Bella. Miss Bella had said that she would like to hear him play someday. He had not seen Miss Bella in a long time.

Frowning at the thought, Edward plugged in the music maker's black cord. He pushed the big button at the top, just like the nice man at the store had shown him. He moved his eating chair from the kitchen and set it right in front of the music maker.

Maybe if he started to play, Miss Bella would hear him.

Edward sat down on his chair and started to play.

* * *

Edward's playing did not sound anything like the music he heard on car radios. It sounded nothing like the wonderful medley of the street musicians lining the main road to the Fish Market.

He tried everything.

He pushed the keys, one-by-one, starting at the left and going all the way to the right. He started at the right and went back left. He pushed only the black keys. He pushed only the white keys. He pushed them both together. He pushed clumps of keys with his fist. He mashed an entire row with his forearm.

But the music maker would not make music like any he had ever heard. Instead, it screamed, it moaned, it cried. He was hurting it. He was killing it.

Miss Bella would not want to hear _this_ music.

Frantically, he punched every button on the console, twisting knobs until the music maker screamed so loud he was sure his ears would start bleeding. Depending on which button he pushed, the music maker sounded like a different type of music, first drums, then guitars, then a harp.

No matter what he did, he could not make the music, that mysterious music that was tickling the edges of his brain, like the flies in his apartment that he could hear but could never seem to find.

He tried for hours, until the darkness outside his little house started turning again to light. Until he could no longer ignore the pounding at his walls and ceiling, that caused the cracks to deepen and the plaster to crumble onto his floor.

"Shut up and let us sleep already!" a nice lady screeched from somewhere up above, and Edward finally did.

He lay down on his mattress and fell asleep, his fingers still twitching, like a puppy frolicking in its dreams.

* * *

For the first time since he'd started working at the library, Edward did not go to work the next day. The moment he opened his eyes, his gaze was owned by the little music maker on the far wall. It was staring at him, pleading with him to come and play.

He watched it while he hunched over and ate his typical breakfast of stale Cheerios. He watched it so carefully that more milk and little round O's spilled out of his overfull bowl than usual. But he kept shoveling the cereal in his mouth until it was all gone, and then he picked up the bowl and slurped every drop of his milk. His mama had taught him to clean his plate. And his bowls.

Then again, his mama had also told him not to play the music.

But his mama wasn't here anymore.

After Edward had carefully cleaned his bowl and his spoon so they would be ready for him to use tomorrow, he started toward the music maker. Just as he sat down, however, there was a knock at his door.

He sat frozen for a moment. No one ever knocked on his door unless it was time to pay the rent. And he'd just recently paid the rent. But if he started playing his music now, the person on the other side of the door would know that he was here anyway, so he should probably just open the door.

Mister Marcus was standing on the other side of the door. Mister Marcus was his landlord, the person who came to take the rent each month and who helped him when his toilet overflowed.

"Eduardo," Mister Marcus said, "why you play the piano last night, eh?"

Sometimes Edward had a harder time than usual understanding Mister Marcus. He was not from America; he was from a place far away called Italy. But as long as Edward paid his rent on time, Mister Marcus was happy. Oddly, Mister Marcus didn't seem happy now, even though Edward had just paid his rent.

"I wasn't. I couldn't play the music," Edward said sadly. Maybe that was the reason why Mister Marcus was also unhappy.

"Yes, I'm thinking everyone in the neighborhood knows this," Mister Marcus said, his mouth firm and hard. "Maybe you play softer. And maybe only during the day, eh?"

Edward felt troubled. He wasn't sure that the music would leave him alone at night. But he nodded automatically, as he always did when someone asked him to do something. Even when sometimes the things they asked him to do were uncomfortable.

"And Eduardo," Mister Marcus said, more softly this time. Mister Marcus always called him Eduardo, even though that was not really his name. "Maybe you should get a teacher, no?"

Edward's face brightened. "I will! Thanks, Mister Marcus."

Mister Marcus looked like he was going to say something else, but Edward had already started closing the door.

A teacher.

Yes, what he needed was a music teacher. Miss Bella and the doctor had not been able to make him smart. But maybe a music teacher could help him find the music.

And he knew exactly where he could find one.

* * *

Jasper Hale hated the sun.

It was the bane of any street performer's existence, baking down on skin and instrument alike, making it uncomfortable to both sit and play or stand and watch. The keys of Jasper's keyboard always started to stick in the heat. That was one of the reasons why he'd left the South, why he'd traveled to the cooler Emerald City to continue practicing his trade.

Today was one of those rare sunny days in Seattle. Seattle natives had fled the city for the nearest body of water like rats abandoning a sinking ship. The decrease in normal pedestrian flow made each passerby all the more special to the street musicians; they turned up the juice whenever a new target was in range, their hands a-flying, mouths a-blowing, feet a-stomping.

Unlike his fellow musicians, Jasper did not have to go into overdrive for every person who passed. With a quick glance at a person's face, he could usually tell whether they were the type to part with their hard-earned money for something as frivolous as five minutes of even the finest music. He could tell if the person was more of a _maybe_ or a _must not_, more of a major or a minor key, more mocking or mercy.

It was all in the eyes. Eyes could look but not see, could look and slide, or could never look at all.

Today, one of the pedestrians caught Jasper's eye. Even from a distance, Jasper pegged him as a mercy, maybe, and minor. Something about the kid was different, was special, from the skewed way that he moved to the wool jacket he sported despite the warmer weather.

The kid was also clearly pinballing between each musician lining either side of the street. He walked with single-minded intensity to stand peering at each person's instrument, listening closely as if conducting some sort of test, a test that each musician he inspected seemed to fail. The kid lingered longest at the street organ a couple of musicians down from Jasper, even stepping into the organist's personal space for a moment to watch his hands.

At the unexpected attention, One-Eyed Pete showed off, reaching for impossible chords and fanning his fingers out across keys on both levels of his organ so that none of them would feel left out. He spewed a cyclone of sound.

The kid smiled at the display, but then shook his head. One-Eyed Pete had failed.

Jasper had to look down at his hands for a while to execute the chord bridge to a new song—in a minor key, of course. When he looked up, the kid was standing right in front of him, appraising Jasper's hands from behind hair that had fallen into his face.

"Hello," the kid said, not quite meeting his eyes, but not exactly in the way that Jasper was used to. Oddly, his eyes were saying one thing—that he would rather be anywhere but here—but his body language was saying the opposite. He was standing way too close to the keyboard, the hip of his high-water khakis almost brushing the far edge. Jasper tensed, uncomfortable to have others so close to his baby.

"Hiya," Jasper said as amiably as he could, hoping that he could still transition this _maybe_ into a _must_. Sometimes, the weird ones like this were good tippers. He didn't want to scare this one off.

"Hello," the kid repeated. "I'm Edward Cullen. I need a music teacher."

Jasper smiled, and his fingers continued automatically across the keys. "You ever heard the saying 'Those who can't do, teach'?"

The kid continued smiling a bleary smile. Jasper didn't think he'd heard the saying.

"Clearly," Jasper said, waving an unoccupied hand at his keyboard. "I _do_. Therefore, I do not teach."

The kid's smile faltered for the first time. Then he looked down and held out a veritable fistful of money.

"I can pay you."

When Jasper looked down and saw that the fist was full of twenties, he stopped playing mid-song, something that he never, ever did. It was bad for business.

"Five hundred dollars?" he said in a low voice, counting quickly. "What, did you break the bank?"

The kid nodded, as though he'd actually taken a hammer to a little pink piggy bank just that morning. Jasper considered himself pretty good at reading people—he wouldn't be playing so close to the Fish Market if he wasn't—but he couldn't tell if this kid was for real or not.

"You want to pay me five hundred dollars for one piano lesson?"

At the sarcasm in his tone, the kid's face fell, and Jasper could sense nothing but sincerity in the expression.

"Yeah, I want that very much. But if you can't help me, I can find somebody else—"

Jasper's hand shot out and grabbed the kid by his slender wrist—the wrist that was holding enough money to pay Jasper's street fees plus keep him well-supplied with his drug of choice for at least the next month. Maybe two, if he was careful.

"No, I would be happy to help you," Jasper said, prying the money easily from the kid's unresisting fingers. He tucked the bills smoothly into his pants, wanting to get the money out of sight before the kid changed his mind. Or before someone else saw.

His fellow street musicians were looking around dangerously, like sharks just beginning to smell bones in the water. Five hundred bones, to be exact. Even the corner policeman was looking in their direction curiously, eager for an excuse to leave his post—any excuse—on this less than exciting day.

Jasper needed to end this, before Officer McBeef (as Jasper had dubbed him due to his thick neck and even thicker waist) stepped in their direction to find out what the "problem" was.

"Here's the deal," Jasper said, and the kid watched his mouth intently. "For that price, I'll give you piano lessons twice a week for the next month."

The kid's eyes sparkled, as though Jasper had just announced that they would be celebrating Christmas every day from now on.

"But only in the evenings. Meet me back here later today, at five."

The kid just stood smiling at him, as though the words took a while to percolate down to his brain's center of understanding. Clearly, he was several keys short of a full keyboard. But he had money, and that's all that mattered.

"Five o'clock," the kid repeated slowly. Jasper wouldn't have been surprised if the kid spit into his hand and wanted to shake on it. Instead, he smiled his weird little smile again—a smile that warmed Jasper's chest in a weird little way. "See you soon."

The kid nearly sprinted off with a lopsided lope, as though one of his legs was longer than the other.

While Jasper played his full repertoire to uncaring passersby over the course of the rest of the day, he thought about Edward Cullen's guileless face, his innocent eyes. He thought about what would have happened if the kid had held out his money to any other performer on this street.

If the kid was always so liberal with his cash, it's a wonder he hadn't already starved to death. Although with those gaunt cheekbones, perhaps he was well on his way.

* * *

When it came to Edward's piano-playing, Jasper had no great expectations. In fact, he would be lucky if the kid could even learn. He had delicate hands, sure, but Jasper wasn't sure that his mind could direct those hands to do what they needed to do.

In their first session together, Jasper's suspicions were confirmed.

As Jasper had been packing up his equipment and carefully storing his meager tips, Edward had sidled up to him for the second time that day, looking down at him expectantly. Jasper did not remember him being so tall. Jasper stood up straighter and swung his arms through the hiker's backpack that he had customized to hold his keyboard. Without a word, he started off on the hike for home, Edward following obligingly at his heels like a waddling duckling.

Jasper led Edward to a small, forgotten parking garage deep in the bowels of the city. It had been condemned long ago, and other buildings had built up around it, obscuring an entrance that you could only find now if you knew how. Only Jasper, his family, and a few of their trusted colleagues and suppliers knew how.

He took Edward down stairs that sunk them even lower into the earth. For a moment, the gloom was complete, and Jasper could hear Edward's breath hitch in fear. He seemed like the kind of kid to be afraid of the dark. As their eyes adjusted, however, Jasper could already see the first flicker of fire.

Rounding a crumbling concrete corner, they entered into a makeshift gypsy camp of boxes and fire barrels scattered cheerfully across a floor filled with leaves and other debris that had become forever trapped down here under the earth.

As always, Jasper made his rounds, chatting briefly with each of his fellow denizens to ensure that they had what they needed for the evening, checking that no one had bothered them during their day. These people were his family, and he protected his family. Only after he was satisfied that everyone was doing as well as expected did he turn back to Edward, who he had left standing at the fringes of the warmth, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched into his brown jacket to ward off the creeping cold.

"C'mere," he said, gesturing that Edward step closer to one of the outlying fire barrels. Jasper erected the stand for his keyboard once again, near enough to the flames that he could still see the keys by the warm, flickering light.

He grasped Edward on the shoulder, and although the kid tensed, he did allow Jasper to direct him to the three-legged stool in front of the keyboard. Only after Edward had seated himself carefully and looked up at him with bright eyes dancing with flame did Jasper realize that he had absolutely no idea how to teach anyone else to play the piano. Piano had always been as easy to him as breathing. He was a natural, his mother had said, right before the alcohol finally killed her.

Edward, however, was the complete opposite of natural.

For one, Edward seemed to be tone deaf. Jasper could hum a note, any note, and Edward would not be able to find it on the keyboard, no matter how many keys he plucked. Edward's hands, which could softly and carefully brush the hair out of his eyes, became rigor-mortis claws when Jasper directed them into an approximation of the fingering required for even the most simple of songs.

And Edward could not play a single note over and over again to match any pattern that Jasper clapped.

This might be the longest month of Jasper's life. He consoled himself with the thought that he would at least have an ample supply of mind-dulling substances to help him get through it.

Two evenings later, Jasper again led Edward back to the hidey-hole.

"I've been practicing!" Edward said.

Jasper couldn't tell.

He tried everything he could think of to get Edward to play some semblance of music, any music. It got to the point where he would place his own hands over Edward's, trying to direct those clawed digits to the appropriate notes. But even with Jasper manipulating Edward's limp limbs like he was a crash test dummy, the resulting sounds were often too garbled by Edward's fingers slipping over the keys to be recognizable as music.

By the end of their sessions, they were both often breathing hard and sweating under the heat of the fire. By the end, Jasper was always ready to pull his hair out and curl up in his makeshift cardboard tent with a good bottle. By the end, however, Edward's face was always blazing with its own fire.

"Good job!" he would say. "We made pretty music."

Edward seemed to have a bountiful supply of optimism. If Jasper could bottle it and sell it, he could at last be a wealthy man.

"I'm getting better," Edward would say. "One day, I'm going to be as good as you."

Jasper doubted it.

When Edward met him back on his street corner the Thursday after their month of scheduled sessions was up, Jasper didn't even comment. He merely packed up his things and listened to Edward babble all the way home, sweet home. He told himself that he was letting Edward again follow him home like a stray puppy because it was Christmas Eve and Edward clearly didn't have anyone else to spend the holiday with.

Jasper spent the evening playing rousing Christmas carols to the light of an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at his nose and his family nipping at their brown paper packages. As was their tradition, he and his family substituted inappropriate lyrics to the songs, and Edward encouraged them by clapping enthusiastically off-beat and occasionally belting out an off-key word here and there.

Jasper would never have admitted this, but the kid was growing on him.


	12. The Oracle

Before, Mary had been an oracle.

She saw the future like dark shadows through milky glass, grayscale vistas and faces that shifted as rapidly as sand on a crescent dune. Sometimes, she saw the merest gleam of color, like jewels in the filtered light of the ocean floor—colors of rich, earthen hair and eyes of budding leaves. But more often than not, she saw death, decay, and destitution, all in various swathes of gray.

When she had sat in the shabby lounge of the El Rey institution, she had looked at the slack faces of her fellow prisoners and had seen the sun setting in their eyes. Sometimes, she dreamt of white-garbed aliens with fingers like needles that inflicted endless pain. Most importantly, though, she looked at a new nurse or "friend" and foresaw the day that they, too, would leave her.

She helped fulfill her own prophecy by doing her best impression of a feral animal—bitey, scratchy, whiny. Her habitual greeting was "I don't like you," not because she didn't but because she shouldn't.

Before, the people in her life had been rapid blows to the gut: minimal contact that left only pain. Now, the people in her life were no more than entries in a dictionary.

All because of Dr. Jenks.

{ Dr. Jay Jenks—Ph.D. in Neuropsychology from Yale. Father figure slash Albert Einstein. Visionary who liberated her from her pink prison. }

Because of Dr. Jenks, Alice now knew that Mary had been no oracle—Mary had been crazy. She had been shut away from the world so that she would not hurt herself or others. So that she would no longer try to help "prevent" the deaths that she so often foresaw. Mary's visions had been nothing more than psychotic delusions, the demon spawn of a soul confined in a place with few activities to stimulate her voracious mind.

Now, Alice's voracious mind was stimulated. Alice was no longer crazy. Dr. Jenks had freed her from the pink prison, but she was still locked in a different prison—the prison of her mind. She was Ms. Pac-Man, destined to wend through an incessant, inky maze, chomping gleaming nuggets of knowledge while being chased by the ghosts of her past—and her future.

Alice currently sat in front of a terminal in Dr. Jenks' lab, information blurring across her screen like scenes in a flip book, data streaming too rapidly for anyone without an expanding mind to comprehend. She paused the flow for a moment when the door to the lab creaked open, a rectangle of light unhelpfully obscuring a critical half of the screen. The beginnings of the sentences were less important than the endings.

Alice didn't even turn her head to acknowledge the intrusion. The nurse was early.

"I have five more minutes," she said. Prim and precise. The door closed her back into her little box.

In four of those minutes, Alice read fifty thousand words along her various topics of research for the day, including neuropsychology, divination, and color theory. In those four minutes, she learned that public opinion was widely divided on Dr. Jenks' miracle drug, that the Mayans had foretold the future by interpreting the organs of newly sacrificed humans, and that all colors showcased well against a backdrop of white.

For the last minute, Alice indulged in her secret project. She pressed the combination of keys that simultaneously obscured her application and gave her access to classified files. To her overseers, it would look like her screen continued scrolling through tips on foretelling the future through tea leaves. A private joke, but she did not smile. She tapped another shortcut key, and Edward's dossier came up.

{ Edward Anthony Cullen—_Kindred spirit_. Damaged yet undeniably dazzling. }

The doctor and his team didn't know she could access her and Edward's medical files. But there was very little information that Alice could not access these days. She was a spider, the computer her web; its strands shivered and danced when she pulled them. She trapped all the data she wanted and sucked it dry.

As she pulled up the medical charts from Edward's most recent checkup, she immediately noted that, while his acetylcholine and glutamate levels had risen, his serotonin had decreased. The changes were not statistically significant and did not correlate with her own, which is why the tracking software had not flagged them. Of course, the software in question was a laughable substitute for the likes of Alice.

In her increasingly expert opinion, the changes were just significant enough.

Her fingers trembled slightly as she accessed the video of his weekly interview. She had watched Edward in more than twenty-five of these videos. She'd seen countless variations of his smile, his crinkled nose, his raised eyebrows. She'd counted the decreasing number of times that his stories included the name "Miss Bella."

And Alice was glad. Out of all the people she had known, Edward was the first she had ever wanted to love—if love him she could. She had noticed, dispassionately, that her supercomputer brain seemed to lack the necessary algorithms for empathy and emotion. Her feelings for Edward were some of the few she had left. She clutched at them like a rope on the face of a sheer cliff.

They had not asked Alice to help monitor Edward's condition, but they were fools. She sat quietly as the video buffered, a spider motionless in the center of its web, and watched for a sign that only she might see.

This week's checkup started much like any other. The same questions asked in the same bored tone; the same degree of enthusiasm in Edward's face and voice as he answered those same questions with the same words. The same simple speech patterns, the same overly bright smile, the same hazy green eyes.

But then, only for a second, there was something that was not the same. Data so minute, so seemingly disconnected from the results that Dr. Jenks and his team were looking for that they had missed it. To them, the discrepancy was like boughs swaying on a single tree in a forest devoid of wind. A slight twitch of Edward's fingers—nothing more.

Alice blinked; her own fingers twitched. She froze the frame, zoomed in, and replayed.

Edward's delicate digits curled on his lap, partially obscured by the lip of the table. As she watched, those fingers played a piano scale with perfect form, the thumb sliding under first his third finger, then his fourth, as if he was playing an imaginary row of keys lining his thigh.

Dr. Jenks' assistant hadn't even made a note. Obviously, the assistant was not Bella Swan.

{ Isabella Marie Swan—_Generic everywoman_. Generically beautiful, generically intelligent. The girl Alice should have been. The only girl Edward really saw. Harbinger of destruction. }

Or maybe that last part had been only a dream.

If Bella had been there for Edward's latest checkup, she would have seen what Alice had just seen. Like Alice, she had been waiting for a sign. Unlike Alice, she had grown weary and had given up. She was not worthy to have seen the sign.

Alice replayed the video two more times, noting other small details that could also account for Edward's anomalous readings—the way his smile did not quite reach his eyes (decreased serotonin would be affecting his mood). The way he hesitated minutely before responding to a slightly sarcastic question (increased glutamate might account for his newfound ability to sense subtleties in tone). And, of course, the pattern of his fingers.

Alice replayed those fluid fingers again and again until her five minutes were up, the potential ramifications tracing an elaborate fractal in the steel of her mind. When her play time was over, she powered down her computer before she had to be told. She could see her reflection in the darkened screen—the delicate face of a doll. But lift off the porcelain veneer and see the obscene circuitry twisted beneath.

She shuffled behind the nurse on the way back to a room that was no longer pink.

"I don't like pink," she had said as soon as she was able and had immediately begun composing instructions to revamp the space. It was now layered with intricate, dark colors that complemented her complexion. They had even let her hang dark curtains over her "mirror" to form her own, private cocoon. The nurse shut the door behind her, and the illusion was complete.

That night, in her dreams, her ghosts gave chase. Ms. Pac-Man flew frantically through her maze and Alice's sleeping limbs flogged her bedding as if to rid it of dust. She was close; she could feel it. Her neural pathways were compensating at last for the overflow of information, restructuring and realigning themselves to accommodate the vast amount of knowledge her brain was now capable of holding. She had drunk from the fire hose, every last drop.

In the darkness of her den, Alice's eyes snapped open, her face a snow-white orb against a satin-red pillow. Ms. Pac-Man had at last ingested all the glowing orbs and had reached the maze exit. She stepped forth into endless ebony unbounded by walls, a miasma of possibility.

Her dry, fractured lips whispered, "It's time."

She thought of Edward's flowing fingers and smiled her fake, plastic doll smile. As they say, girls do mature faster than boys.

**

* * *

**Note: My most intelligent of betas (CapriciousC and moonlightdreamer333) provided the context and terminology for Edward's test results. Their genius rivals Alice's. But don't tell her that.


	13. Twinkle little star

Note: I have a thing about thirteenth chapters. Somehow they always wind up being significant. Enjoy.

* * *

Edward stood at the brink of a new year.

It was like he was back at Discovery Park, standing tall on the bluff looking out into the endless water. But when he looked down, he could see no water playing an eternal game of tag with the shore. He could see no sky covering the sea like a fluffy blanket.

He could see only darkness.

He stood on a cliff staring into a depthless abyss that threatened to swallow him whole, winds raging and clutching at his limbs to drag him down, begging him to let go, to jump. And the music, that elusive music, was growing stronger, louder, swelling within his soul. No longer could he brush it away as easily as buzzing gnats.

The music was a dragon breathing fire into his veins and unhinging its jaw to devour him. There was nothing he could do to stop it.

Miss Bella was already gone.

He could feel himself burning, slipping away.

With a single shudder, Edward spread his arms and fell forward into the abyss. And with a gleeful, gaping grin, music consumed him.

* * *

For a while, Edward sat in the obsidian abyss, listening to the music.

While he went through the motions of his life, he listened to the music all around him. He listened to Jasper and the other street musicians spreading their disjointed harmonies like a virus to everyone who passed. He listened to all the music that his money would buy from the local thrift store. He listened to car radios and TV sets and speakers in the stores.

He didn't just hear the music; he _listened_ to it. He listened to the sound the wind made crying at his window each night, begging to be let in. He listened to the rhythm of his footsteps carrying him across the pavement. He listened to the Emerald City breathing and screeching and rattling its cage.

As he listened, his own music maker sat still and silent, a marker on his grave.

As he listened, he found the melodies that had been so elusive to his ear. He found his rhythm in the beating of his heart.

One day, he had listened enough.

It was time to play.

He sat down on his little chair in front of his music maker, and his fingers and thighs and lips trembled in anticipation. He brought the music maker to life, coaxing it from its slumber. He touched a pure, white key—middle C.

As he pressed that single, forlorn key in the middle of an alphabet ocean, a single pinprick of light illuminated the darkness of his abyss.

The light twinkled at him, his little star.

Edward lifted his other fingers to the music maker like a conductor preparing to direct a full orchestra. He pressed the tips of his fingers to the keys in the gentlest caress of a baby's cheek.

Then he began to play.

With each note he played, more pinpricks of light broke through the darkness, rays of light imploding into a dark globe. With his fingers, he dotted the dark heavens with light—single stars and clusters and systems and entire galaxies.

With his fingers, he made the galaxies dance.

Edward threw back his head and laughed.

Miss Bella would hear _this_ music.

* * *

Some days, he forgot to go to work. Some days, he forgot to sleep or to eat. But every day, he played the music.

Because the residents of Edward's dilapidated Belltown apartment had been the first to be subjected to Edward's music, it was fitting that they were the first to notice the change.

The evening regulars sat with two chair legs halfway out on their balconies (which were not big enough to accommodate all four chair legs), overlooking what was called a "courtyard" in the flimsy tri-fold that they received as a consolation prize for viewing and/or leasing one of the units. Many of them were arguing; many of them were smoking; all of them were listening for the strains of their evening "serenade."

Before the resident in apartment 108 had purchased his little music-massacring machine, they had bickered among themselves about who was tossing mop water where, what garbage belonged to whom, and what type of clothing was appropriate to dry in the public eye.

An especially popular topic of debate was the lacy undergarments of the aspiring actress named Wanda in 305. The men staunchly defended the right to dry clothes—all clothes—in the breezeway; their wives did not. Unfortunately for the wives, Wanda lived on the top floor, so it was more difficult for said undergarments to "accidentally" get doused in grimy water. Of course, this fact didn't always preclude an especially ambitious woman from trying.

The residents had slowly stopped squabbling with each other, however, as Edward's new daily tradition focused their ire toward a single window on the first floor—specifically, toward the inexplicable dissonance emanating from his little keyboard. How could the resident in 108 possibly be extracting so much fail from so few keys?

When Edward had settled in to play the piano, they settled in to play as well, a game one of the Art Institute students called "Alley Cat." For, as was the common response to the mewling of an alley cat, Edward's playing often compelled residents to toss the nearest object toward the sound.

But one drizzly day, the regulars sat smoking their drug of choice, today's worthless piece of junk a lazy arm's reach away, when they heard it—the familiar melody of _Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. _That the strains of a simple child's song were wafting from the 108 window was not particularly surprising; that the strains wafting from the window were recognizable was.

The next night: _Twinkle _again,this time with a haunting counterpoint in the left hand that was a single gold thread of sound woven among the cotton of the familiar melody. Impossibly, the simple song transformed from sing-song annoyance to childhood nostalgia. The next day, the housewives found themselves humming the unusual harmony he'd superimposed while they wiped and scrubbed and dumped their buckets into the tub for a change.

Within a week, Edward was regaling his neighbors with simple pieces like _Heart and Soul_, _Für Elise_, _Minuet in G_, and other songs that they could recognize but not name.

For the first time, the small courtyard in Belltown lived up to the marketing hype of being "your own quiet utopia amid the bustling city." When the music began, the grumbling and arguing ceased—the music the water and the petty grievances the oil; the two did not, could not mix. From the time Edward came home from work until he tumbled—spent—into bed, the courtyard exceeded its calling; it became a cathedral of worship to the purity of sound, the innocence of soul that Edward embodied and poured into his burgeoning music.

Edward's neighbors no longer tossed him useless junk to discourage him. Instead, they tossed him other things to beg him to play—notebook paper folded into a square, wadded up, or made into a paper airplane, their favorite song scrawled in its folds.

If Edward recognized the name of the song, he played it on the spot. If not, he would seek out Jasper the following day to teach it to him. When Jasper didn't know the song, Edward interviewed the musicians lining the street until he found one who could at least sing it to him. Whether someone had demonstrated the chord progression to him or had merely hummed the melody, Edward would play the song for his neighbors the following day.

Jasper was therefore the next to notice something different about Edward.

At first, he merely humored Edward's requests to demonstrate increasingly complicated songs on his keyboard. He thought Edward was parroting the song requests from one of his friends or co-workers, and Jasper pitied the poor soul who had to listen to the results.

Nevertheless, he demonstrated whatever song the kid wanted to see.

"Look, but don't touch," he would warn. Edward would nod solemnly and would lean forward on the balls of his feet, listening intently.

Because Jasper couldn't afford to lose any of the credibility he'd worked hard to establish as a Pike's Market musician, he couldn't let Edward try his hand at the keyboard during work hours. Like his fellow artists lining the street, Jasper had been slowly working his way toward the prime real estate where Pike and Pine streets intersected at the world famous Pike's Place Fish Market. The goal of playing in the prime location in front of the Fish Market was called the "Pike Dream." They all shared it, but it was notoriously difficult to get ahead in this elaborate game of king of the hill.

To perform in front of Seattle's premier tourist attraction, you had to pay the right people the right amount of money. Unfortunately, to make the right amount of money as a Seattle street musician, you had to play to as large a number of tourists as possible, the better to increase your chances of getting a tip. The lucky musician playing in front of the Fish Market played to the largest cross section of Seattle tourists and, therefore, received the largest amount of tips, further solidifying everyone else's "Pike Dream" as nothing but a pipe dream.

Granted, over the years, the kings of the hill had a nasty habit of disappearing. The current musician was a wiry fiddler who played a mean _Devil Went Down to Georgia_ and who had who had reigned supreme several months longer than most. He was a dubious fellow with a blonde ponytail whose frequent facial abrasions (bruises, split lips, and the like) showed that he spent considerable time after hours either defending his throne or allowing himself to be beaten silly at the local fight club.

Jasper suspected that the fiery redhead who tap-danced to his fiddling also factored in to the fiddler's unexpected tenure. She had great gams and pouty red lips and had caught the eye of the head fishmonger, who Jasper suspected was more involved in the affairs of the street musicians than you would think from his open smile, hearty singing voice, and ability to prevent even the most slippery of fish from dropping to the floor.

Because Jasper yearned for both the popularity and stable income afforded by Pike's prime spot, he couldn't allow Edward's clumsy fingers to cause him to forfeit his unwritten yet understood slot in the hierarchy. Therefore, Jasper had to perform Edward's requested songs himself. He couldn't sit Edward in front of him and guide his fingers to the correct keys like he could back in the parking garage. He couldn't repeat any of the sections. And he definitely couldn't ask Edward to attempt to play the song back to him. Instead, he asked Edward to stand at the perfect distance—not too far that he couldn't see the keys but far enough to break the ice, to entice other passersby to join him.

People rarely stopped for a street musician flying solo, but they flocked like lemmings to one with an audience. Particularly an audience as appreciative as Edward seemed to be.

Despite Jasper's misgivings about pseudo piano lessons during work hours, Edward never asked him to repeat sections of the songs, and he never showed any inclination to reach for the keys. He merely stood in his perfect spot, a demure statue, and listened.

Oddly, Edward hadn't shown up in the evening for follow-up lessons in over a week. Jasper had noted that Edward had looked more pinched and gaunt than usual. And he hardly ever smiled.

The stoner in Jasper wanted to ignore this change in Edward, but the musician in him could not. Edward seemed to be pulling an increasingly complicated song list out of a black top hat. When Edward requested the quintessential pop piano song—Billy Joel's _Piano Man_—Jasper decided to follow Edward after working hours to see what he was doing with Jasper's instruction. If nothing else, Jasper wanted to see what Edward planned to do with his assertion that _Piano Man_ could not be played properly without the harmonica in the intro (which Jasper had to borrow from a minor musician several blocks west to demonstrate).

The next time Edward came begging for a song demonstration, Jasper packed up early and followed Edward's beeline back to wherever it was.

As Jasper expected, Edward was so easy to shadow that Jasper could probably have done it blindfolded. He was so focused on his feet and their placement on the sidewalk that he rarely noticed the people he passed, much less someone who might be following. In fact, Edward barely seemed to notice when a couple of career hoodlums dropped their respective shoulders in a classic high school football tackling pose and clotheslined him, knocking him to the ground.

The hoodlums were enjoying a rousing game of 'tard-tipping.

From the warped grins on their faces as they turned to watch Edward scrabble up, stammer a garbled "Sorry," and continue walking, Jasper could tell that they had done this to Edward before.

Jasper immediately strolled between the hoodlums and threw up his elbows as he passed, catching them both in the nose. He was around the corner before they knew what hit them. In a casual glance back, he saw them in paroxysms on the ground like dying spiders, blood gushing from two noses that he hoped were broken.

Jasper hadn't even broken stride. Edward was part of his family now, and Jasper took care of his family. In the future, they would think twice about tipping this 'tard.

He trailed Edward for two more blocks until the kid disappeared into a rundown building that made the parking garage look like the Bellagio. When he reached for the gate, he saw that the locking mechanism was too loose to serve its purpose; he didn't even have to jimmy the door for it to swing open at his touch.

Edward was nowhere to be seen. Jasper followed the trail of cracks and mildew on the wall until the dark corridor vomited him out into a small concrete garden with sky access that allowed at least some of the excrement and garbage stench to dissipate. It was then, as he stood scanning the row of identical green doors for some sign of Edward, that he first heard the music.

Now that he thought about it, the courtyard of the apartment complex had been too still and quiet for your typical Seattle sub-community. When he first walked in to their sanctuary, he had not even noticed nearly every resident at attention on their balconies. But now he saw their still forms partially obscured and then revealed by the billowing sheets hanging across laundry lines above him, their bodies oriented toward the music.

Instinctively, he knew that they had been waiting for this.

The introductory bars of _Piano Man_ played in an eerily perfect reproduction of Jasper's earlier performance in the market, minor flaws and all.

But Edward could not possibly be playing.

The Edward he knew was tone deaf and rhythm deficient. Edward couldn't even play the stair-stepping notes of the easiest of child songs. Edward could not have played _Piano Man_ if his life had depended on it.

When a melancholy harmonica joined in the fray, Jasper gasped and took a single step toward the source of the music. In that instant, a white sheet billowed out of the way, exposing a window that opened into a dark, dank apartment.

Through the gloom, Jasper could see the same gray shirt and the same disheveled hair that he'd followed through the city streets.

Impossibly, it was Edward.

Impossibly, Edward was playing this music. Edward's fingers were (smoothly!) masterminding the keys. Edward's head was bobbing along (on beat!) to the movements of his arms.

Jasper's seasoned ear could discern that Edward's fingers still lacked the muscle-memory required to flawlessly execute the more difficult chord reaches and scales that the song contained. However, he course-corrected beautifully and never made the same mistake twice. As Edward became more comfortable with the song's eddies and flows, he began to improvise, adding more intricate harmonies and melodies as an additional, rich layer to the base song that Jasper had taught him.

Jasper couldn't have uprooted himself from this spot even if he'd been faced with a herd of stampeding elephants. He'd stare them down, listen to the music, and die a happy, flat man.

He was obviously the best piano teacher on the planet.

When the echoes of the final harmonica note died away, the little courtyard erupted in applause. Even the laundry flapping in the breeze seemed to be paying homage to the creator of such music. He looked down and was surprised to see himself clapping right along with them, as hard as hands could go.

And then it began to snow.

Jasper watched a veritable blizzard of white—was it paper?—drift from all facets of the building toward Edward's window. Many of the paper wads and airplanes made it to their intended target. But one of the balls ricocheted off the peeling window frame and rolled until it collided with the toe of Jasper's boot. Although it felt sacrilegious to touch something that had clearly been intended as offering or payment for whatever it was that he had just experienced, Jasper bent to retrieve it.

In the center of the crumpled paper were two words: _Ave Maria_.

A song request.

Jasper thought the words particularly appropriate; if he were a praying man, now might be a praying moment. Although it would be more like _Hail Edward._

When Edward started to play another song, plucking a request from the floor of his apartment like manna from heaven, Jasper realized that Edward's newfound ability had absolutely nothing to do with his instruction.

Jasper hadn't taught him that song.

Edward clearly had some sort of internal talent that had taken a while to well up from inside him but was now gushing out with such force that Jasper was surprised he wasn't crushed beneath his own tidal wave.

Edward needed an outlet, and fast.

And Jasper had just the thing.

* * *

Note: The concept of what is happening to Edward in the abyss was inspired by the lyrics of Only Hope, after which this story was named. And the idea of Edward "hearing the music" and playing it so that Miss Bella would hear was inspired by the movie _August Rush_, a movie that I watched recently and found particularly applicable to this story as well. In other words, I'm pretty much wholly unoriginal, but I can only hope (pun intended) that I have taken all these threads from different places and have woven them into something new for your reading pleasure. Thus is the joy of fanfiction.


	14. Just the thing

Jasper scraped together what was left of Edward's money, supplementing it with his own stash. He bought a brand-spankin' new keyboard from one of his buddies, the closest approximation of a real piano that money could buy—88 keys that accurately simulated both the sound of a hammer against a spring and the weight needed to push the hammer. He bought an amplifier that would broadcast Edward's music at the highest limit allowed by Seattle street law. He wrestled the new equipment down to the parking garage.

Then he let Edward loose and stood back.

As Edward approached the instrument, his whole body seemed to vibrate, a greyhound awaiting the command to start a race.

"Is this…?" he asked, not taking his wide eyes away from the keyboard for a moment, as though it might disappear if he blinked.

"It's yours."

Edward's eyes were as round as two green fruit loops. "I should pay you."

With a dismissive wave, Jasper said, "You already did. This is covered in the cost of your lessons."

Edward tore his dazzled gaze away from the keyboard with effort and nodded his head once at Jasper in heartfelt thanks.

Then he was lost in acquainting himself with the instrument. Jasper watched in fascination as Edward traced a finger across the dashboard until he found the power switch. He watched as Edward sat down on his little stool as properly as if he were wearing a tuxedo with coattails.

While Edward arranged his limbs, Jasper peered slyly at his family, who were digging deeper into their boxes as if the flimsy cardboard could barricade them against an anticipated hurricane. He smiled smugly to himself at the thought that the sound waves they would hear would be anything but disruptive.

For when Edward started playing, it was no hurricane of sound. It was a fresh breeze rippling through a hanging garden of clean, sun-soaked laundry. It was the pitter patter of rain on a tin roof on a warm day in Brazil. It was a home far away and long ago full of life and love and laughter.

Edward warmed up by carefully caressing every key, gathering them together like baby chicks so that none of them would feel left out. He showered them all with finger kisses and coaxed out their absolute best.

As he warmed up, he also warmed Jasper's family up. Their clenched bodies relaxed, arms melting from vice grips around torsos, heads craning to verify that Jasper hadn't tricked them with the old switcheroo—sitting down to play in Edward's stead.

But it didn't sound like Jasper.

They gophered up from their boxes and saw that it was, indeed, Edward. Even Old Betty, who was bone-weary from pushing her recycling cart every day, sat up and threw sleep off like a potato sack.

Jasper watched quietly until Edward had had enough private time with his keyboard. Then he drew up his stool in front of his more careworn instrument, which looked like a ratty old boot next to a shiny loafer. But it had aged like a fine wine and would still be able to show this young whippersnapper a thing or two.

Jasper played discord for a moment to get Edward's attention. When he cringed and looked over, Jasper said, "Let's play a game."

Edward smiled. Games and music were two of his favorite things in the world.

They started by playing a musical version of Marco Polo. Jasper would play, and Edward would echo. They played tag, Jasper chasing Edward up and down the keys, forcing Edward to improvise or be caught. They played Follow the Leader, and Edward stayed right on Jasper's heels.

Jasper showed Edward how to fade into the background by playing in the lower octaves. He showed him how to complement by playing high. He showed him how to dominate in his own solo, twirling and dipping.

When they were through, Edward was giggling breathlessly, bouncing in his seat and begging for more. But Jasper needed him fresh.

That night, Jasper walked Edward safely to his apartment with the promise of seeing him earlier than normal the next day. He knew the kid had a job, but that job didn't matter this week. This week would be Jasper's first all-out assault on the King. He'd dreamt of this moment for years.

But never in his wildest dreams had he imagined Edward.

* * *

The next day, Jasper suited Edward up for battle, outfitting him with a hiker's backpack similar to his own. He showed Edward how to rip the backpack in just the right way that it would hold a keyboard without coming apart at the seams.

They marched down to the water together, their keyboards swaying above their heads like battle standards. Edward followed Jasper gleefully down the sidewalk like a little boy following his father to work.

As they walked, Edward stammered a series of rapid-fire questions, walking quickly so that his mouth was right near Jasper's ear.

"I get to play right beside you?"

"If I play really, really good, can I play with you again?"

"Will a lot of people hear this music?"

An understatement: Edward was excited.

Jasper was too distracted to do more than grunt in assent. Every crevice of his mind was filled with lines of attack and tactics and predictions about who would do what when. He'd even foregone the drugs and the drink last night so that his mind would be clear.

They stopped to cross the final street separating them from their destination. As they waited, Edward set off Jasper's warning bells with his proximity, a hot mouth uncomfortably close. But this time, Edward didn't yell into his ear.

Instead, in a whisper, the merest puff of sound, he asked, "Will Miss Bella hear this music?"

Jasper was so lost in his calculations that he barely registered the question. Three days—he estimated three days before their campaign would begin to yield fruit.

"Yeah kid, give it time, and everyone in the world will hear this music."

Edward was so caught up in creating one of his masterpiece smiles that Jasper had to shepherd him carefully across the street by the shoulder. He didn't want his secret weapon to get hit by a bus before he had a chance to unleash it on the world.

Jasper had been good at chess; he could always think three moves ahead. And the next three days proceeded almost exactly as he'd anticipated. Forget that psychic girlfriend he'd always wanted; he could predict the future with the best of them.

Day 1—Jasper and Edward got a lot of double-takes and stutter-steps from passersby who tripped over their music as they passed. Their musician neighbors began to take one too many smoke breaks while drifting in their general direction.

Day 2—Word of the new duo had spread across Pike Street like crackling fire across spilled oil. Passersby from yesterday stopped this time, blatantly staring. Jasper watched carefully, but saw no sign of the current King of the Hill or any of his minions come to spy.

Day 3—Edward drew people like he was a powerful magnet and they were bits of glinting metal. Jasper perked up each time he saw one of the Fish Market employees stroll by casually. At one point, he thought he saw a flash of fire-hair the color of the King's tap-dancer herself. But as the sun began accepting the sea's embrace, Jasper looked down at his hands, defeated. He had been overly optimistic in his estimate.

Then something drew his eyes up, a phantom prickling on the back of his neck, and he looked into a pair of glacier eyes in a mountain crag face. The King himself stood as no more than a shadow at the periphery of the crowd, his carefully bored gaze directed at Jasper.

The King's eyelashes flickered once, a clear dismissal, before shifting to Edward. As the King watched the kid play, his indifferent mask fractured into cruel lines of hatred—eyes narrowing to slits, incisors exposed, nostrils flaring at some imagined stench.

Then Jasper blinked, and the King was gone.

In three days, Jasper's investment in Edward and his piano had paid off a hundredfold in tips and a thousandfold in street cred. In three days, they had captured the attention and imagination of all the key players in this endless dance for dominance—the crowd, the fishmongers, and the King himself.

Now, the King would see them coming.

But they would come at him like spider monkeys, small yet fierce and quick; they would slip through his defenses before he even realized he should mount any.

* * *

All of Jasper's sacrifices, all of the self-study at his craft, the buckets of sweat wrung out of him by the sun—all of it had been leading up to this point in his life. In the ensuing days of battle, Jasper squeezed his brain like an orange, expunging every last drop of strategic brilliance, every insight he'd soaked up like a sponge since he was a young buck playing on the streets of Austin, the so-called music capital of the world, to pay for his mother's booze.

Through their music, Jasper and Edward knocked down intermediary musicians one by one, like peanut shells flicked off a table. Each day that they upped their rank in the hierarchy, a fishmonger came to confirm their new spot and collect the required street dues, which Jasper paid cheerfully, barely putting a dent in their tip jar.

Edward was like a sleek, young stallion being put through his paces for the first time. Although he was far from perfect and lacked the stamina to play for a full day, he eagerly gave all that was asked.

At the end of each day, Edward repeated the same question. "You're sure everyone will hear this music?"

Jasper was sure—everyone who came down to the market, that is. He may have failed to mention that little detail to Edward.

The morning of the final battle, Jasper rose with the dawn and collected Edward, who rubbed heavy eyes and yawned widely like a kitten. The crisp cool of the morning patted their cheeks awake as they strategically placed their keyboards like canons.

The wiry fiddler and his tap-dancer would be within eye line, yet far enough away that their respective music would not crowd against each other like passengers on a full subway car. Jasper and Edward warmed up with the morning.

The King and his lady arrived only a few minutes before the shops would begin to open, showing by their lateness and their swagger that, to them, this day was no more important than any other. Jasper could almost taste their overconfidence, sour lemon on his tongue.

After the King had unsheathed his fiddle and his lady had pointed each toe high above her head in a perfect vertical split, the King smiled a cruel smile and flicked his bow at them, tipping an imaginary hat. Jasper bowed shallowly, outstretching his arms in the gesture for _Bring it_.

While they were posturing like peacocks, Edward kept playing his keyboard, oblivious. His volume was turned down so low that his music was nothing more than bees buzzing in the distance.

Only Jasper knew that those bees would become in-your-face stingers soon enough.

The music began, creeping slowly like mist over a mountain.

That day, Jasper did something that the King could never have expected. All his life, the King had known nothing but fighting. He'd fought to get out of his mother's womb, fought for life after his mother abandoned him on the street, fought to get kicked out of each successive foster home, fought to coerce his fingers to play the fiddle, and fought to preserve his right to do so.

The King had lost many a tooth and even a nail in his quest to get exactly what he wanted out of a life that had done its best to trample him.

Jasper knew much of the King's history and even much of his mythology—he had studied his enemy, listening ardently to stories from even the least credible of sources. But whether the stories had been fact or fiction, Jasper knew without possibility of doubt that the King would fight to the death.

Therefore, Jasper didn't fight him—he joined him.

As the King's bow began to slide across the strings, Jasper and Edward followed the King's lead, as though he were their conductor. They matched every song that he played.

At first, the King smiled and scoffed at the audacity. He magnanimously allowed the pianos to continue shadowing him, thinking that his fiddle would rise like a shooting star from the mediocre backdrop of piano accompaniment.

Until he realized that he was very, very wrong.

If Jasper had been playing alone, the dexterous fiddle would have danced circles around him. But Jasper was not playing alone. The King began to scowl because the combined impetus of the two keyboards began to effectively relegate him to second fiddle, as it were. In response, the King began whipping out his most difficult songs, playing pieces with sliding scales and soaring riffs that would be nearly impossible to echo on a piano.

Impossible for anyone but Edward, of course.

As the King's set list grew more and more complicated, Jasper played a new game with Edward, a game in which Jasper was the matador and Edward the bull. Jasper taunted and teased, inciting Edward to new heights, riling him up until those green eyes saw nothing but red. As Edward took over the performance, Jasper put himself on the backburner, focusing on channeling the tsunami that was Edward Cullen.

"Follow me, Edward!" he would hiss whenever Edward's attention threatened to wane, whenever he was so consumed by his music that he forgot to listen to the fiddle.

"Marco!" he said whenever Edward didn't know which way to go.

"You're it!" he said when Edward's fingers needed to dance.

Edward played brilliantly, and Jasper played Edward brilliantly. But eventually, Jasper saw that it would not be enough; time began to coat Edward's fingers with fatigue, tumbling them haphazardly across the keys.

In the break before the final set, the King addressed them directly for the first time. "Your little whelp there looks like he needs a pick-me-up," he said, and his lady laughed. "I do hope you've brought a snack."

Jasper slammed off his keyboard and dragged Edward down to the water.

"I don't think that man likes me," Edward said, squinting blearily out over the waves.

Jasper stared at him in shock.

Edward had never once noticed the derision and vitriol directed at him constantly by many people, including members of Jasper's own family. He hadn't noticed being spit at or pushed or knocked over. Yet he had somehow noticed the King's hatred without ever having talked to him?

"Did I do something wrong?" Edward asked, fisting his hands in his hair anxiously.

Jasper grabbed the slender wrists and pulled his hands free. He began massaging circles in the kid's palms, keeping them loose.

"You're doing everything right, Edward," he soothed.

Edward's doubt was plain on his face. "That fiddle sounds mean, like it wants to bite me."

Jasper laughed humorlessly. That was more like the Edward he knew and loved. "No, the fiddle is…it's like a feisty puppy."

Edward looked at his chin and frowned.

"Puppies sometimes growl when you play with them."

Edward continued staring at Jasper's stubble.

"I've never played with a puppy," he said. Then he sighed. "I'm tired." He pulled his hands out of Jasper's and picked at his fingernails in shame.

"I know. I need you to keep going. Just a little while longer." Twenty minutes longer, to be precise. The King's final piece was almost more marathon than music. "Can you do that for me?"

Edward's hands were still. "Of course," he said solemnly. "I would do anything for you."

The simple trust sucker-punched Jasper in the gut. He tried desperately to ignore the weariness in every line of the kid's body. They walked back to their stations to the sound of the King warming up on _Devil Went Down to Georgia_. A song that was written specifically for a fiddle. The song that the King regularly used to vanquish his foes.

As the King drew his bow with a flourish, his Queen smiled a dainty, daunting smile. They exchanged significant glances at the sight of Edward's slumped shoulders.

They thought they had won.

They had sniffed out Edward's weakness. He was a neophyte—he lacked stamina. His exhaustion was as palpable as a sneeze. The King and his lady expected that this final set would crush Edward like a bug on a windshield.

"Edward," Jasper whispered to himself, "play like the wind."

It was a wish and a blessing and a prayer.

As the King sawed the first tones out of his fiddle, Edward began to play. But he didn't play the piano like the wind, delicate and unseen; he played the piano like fire, brazen and blazing. He dominated that piano as effortlessly as a life-long aficionado, an accomplished maestro, a god.

When the King sped up, Edward surpassed him.

When the fiddle mourned, the piano scorned.

When the fiddle challenged, the piano answered.

Although the King played splendidly, Edward played better. At one point during the song, Edward knifed his hands like a ninja up and down the keys. His stool had been long-since kicked aside, forgotten, and he was bent nearly double, like a hunchback scientist coaxing a monster to life.

Despite his contorted limbs and his flying sweat, Edward playing was the most beautiful thing that Jasper had ever seen. He played like a man stripped bare, scrubbed of shyness and self, no barriers between him and the essence of his music.

It was like staring through a little peephole into a room full of heaven.

Then the music stopped, and the last echo rippled through the onlookers like wind across the surface of a deep pond. The crowd that had gathered spilled out well past the usual boundaries. For a moment, the pond was still. Then, every pair of hands began applauding the music.

At the sound, the King puffed up and stepped forward with pride. He had played exceptionally, a zenith performance.

But every eye was trained on the pianist. Every pair of hands clapped for the youngling who stood, swaying, his fingers limp on his keys.

Jasper knew that they had won.

_Edward_ had won.

King James and Queen Victoria were no longer. They were just James and Victoria.

Jasper should be celebrating. He should be clapping along with the rest of his new flock. He should be hooting and hollering and stomping his feet.

Instead, he was staring at the bloody fingerprints dotting Edward's keys.

They were like paint spatters dripped on a previously pristine canvas. Bloody fingers plunged into Jasper's chest and squeezed at his lungs until he couldn't breathe.

Stepping forward, he guided Edward carefully away from the soiled instrument, waving back the throngs of adoring fans who wanted to congratulate and touch and bask in the glow of this new star fallen from the sky.

At Jasper's touch, Edward awoke as if from a deep sleep. With one hand, Jasper righted the cast-off stool and guided Edward down into it with the other. Edward searched his face as intently as if looking for a diamond along the seashore.

"Did she hear?" he croaked brokenly. "Did Miss Bella hear the music?"

Jasper shook his head. He didn't know who this Miss Bella was, he didn't know if she'd heard the music, and he wasn't going to lie to Edward anymore, to this kid—no, to this man who had broken and bloodied himself for Jasper.

"I don't know."

Edward closed his eyes, slipping into silence. He remained slumped on his stool, immobile, as Jasper packed up their gear. Part of being a successful performer was knowing when to leave the stage, and that time was now. They were protected from the certainty of the ex-King's knee-jerk wrath by the surge of people who ringed Edward like a moat.

On their walk back to his apartment, Edward sagged behind Jasper despite the fact that Jasper was carrying both instruments. The weight of the keyboard was too much for Edward, just as the weight of his guilt was too much for Jasper. Shame had carved a canyon into his chest.

He wasn't good enough to wash this kid's feet.


	15. A day to remember

Of all the days in Edward's life, there was one he remembered the most, a day that stood out in his memory like a fallen robin's egg on the forest floor.

That day, his mama had told him they were going on a big trip. He had been bounce-on-his-bed excited because she rarely ever took him with her anymore when she left their small white house, especially not after he'd stopped going to school with Rosalie.

He remembered the strangest things about that day. Mostly, he remembered the color blue. Mama looked very pretty in a blue dress, the dress that she only ever wore to church on Christmas or Easter. Rosalie had stared at him with her big, blue eyes as he ate his Cheerios out of a big, blue bowl. Even the sky outside was an impossible blue, its usual layer of angry clouds taking a break from their customary game of peek-a-boo.

He was excited to be going outside with Mama dressed so pretty. He was excited that Rosalie wasn't in their little blue car with them. Rosalie looked pretty, but she didn't always act pretty. She didn't always make him feel so good. Because she wasn't here, he got to sit in the front seat next to Mama, proudly buckling himself in with an emphatic _click_.

Edward had stared into the cloudless sky for many hours until the tall blue buildings had begun to block his view. When the buildings eventually crowded out the sky, he'd looked down at last and had immediately been confused and overwhelmed—too many cars, too many people, too many sights, too many sounds.

Too far from home.

"Where are we, Mama?" he'd asked.

"Seattle," she'd said, her lips tight and angry, like the city had done something wrong. She hadn't looked at him.

He knew about a city named Seattle, but Mama had never taken him there before. When he imagined Seattle, he imagined the sea and the boats and the fish, the beautiful blue and green pictures that some of his earliest teachers had painted in his mind. But they had not told him anything about the giant buildings staring down at him, evil glinting eyes and razor-sharp teeth.

Edward remembered how their car had been swallowed deep into one of the menacing buildings. He remembered how Mama had gripped his wrist, hard, as she'd pulled him through a maze of hallways tinged blue with fluorescent lights. He remembered how they'd stood in a little room with blue walls covered in pictures of smiling people, and she'd finally released his hand.

He remembered that he hadn't understood why she was crying.

"Please don't be sad, Mama," he'd said.

He remembered that day best of all because it was the day his mama had left him, had dropped him off at an institution in Seattle like he was a stray dog. It was the last day he saw his family and the little white house he'd grown up in.

It was the last day he ever saw his mama.

She hadn't even said goodbye.

He'd been thinking about that day a lot recently. He'd been thinking about that day because it was a day he _could_ remember. Because there was another day he couldn't—he couldn't remember the exact day when Miss Bella had left him. One day she was with him in the library, and the next day she…wasn't.

She hadn't said goodbye, either.

When his mama had left him, he hadn't done anything about it. He wasn't smart enough. And he was forbidden from playing the music.

There had been a music maker in their living room, the prettiest, shiniest thing they owned. Some of his earliest memories were of him standing next to mama while she played, his head resting on some of the deep, dark keys that she never used. He liked to have his head close to her fingers so that he could watch them carefully.

Sometimes, he tried to make his fingers do like hers. When he was very young, Mama would smile at him when he played, pounding and banging as he smiled back up at her. But even as he grew older, he kept pounding and banging, and she stopped smiling.

One day, he was sitting in Mama's seat in front of the music maker, and she walked in from the kitchen, where she was making cookies. Because he knew he had her attention, he played louder, looking up at her with a big smile, to see if she liked his music.

She didn't.

"Stop," she said, so quietly at first that he didn't even hear her over the cacophony he was gleefully creating.

"Stop," she said, a little louder.

He didn't. He saw her lips move, but he didn't understand what she meant.

"Stop."

"Stop."

"Stop."

"Stop."

"STOP!!" She screamed it into his ear, and this time, he heard her. He stopped. She reached over and slammed the piano shut. His fingers had still been on the keys.

"Edward, you are never to play the piano again. Do you hear me? I forbid it. Do you understand?"

He nodded up at her with his fingers in his mouth. He was trying to suck away the pain.

He never played the music again. He was forbidden.

A few weeks later was the day that mama took him on their little trip. The day that she didn't say goodbye.

* * *

The days after his mama had left him ran together in Edward's mind like the strokes of blue paint they had given him to play with. They always asked him to draw what he was thinking, what he was feeling. He only ever drew an angry mess of clouds covering the sky. He only ever used the blue paint. The other colors, the happy colors lined up in neat circles, remained dry and unused. Eventually, they began to crack.

Even after he'd been released from the institution, after they'd helped him get his own little house and his jobs at the library and the park, the days blended together like a video tape on fast-forward.

But then came another day that he would remember. On this day, a girl agreed to be his friend. He'd never asked anyone to be his friend before.

She'd said yes.

And, just like that, his day was no longer passing in yet another faceless blur. Time had seemed to slow.

He'd shared his day with her, showing her the books and the boats and the beach. He hadn't shared himself with anyone for a long time, not since before that day he remembered the most. Then, because the girl's attention, the girl's smile had made him feel bold, he'd shared with her his longing for the music.

He'd passed that little music maker more times than he could count. But only because he couldn't count very high.

And this girl.

This girl had told him that she would like to hear him play.

So when she left without saying goodbye, Edward knew that the music would be the only thing that would bring Miss Bella back.

Jasper had told him that she would hear the music they were playing down by the water. So Edward played his music for her, day after day. He played his best for her.

But she didn't hear.

Not yet.

He would just have to keep playing until she did.

* * *

The day after their assault on the King of the Hill, Jasper was awakened by the feel of something nudging his boot.

He didn't want to wake up; he could vaguely remember a hard-core celebration with his family after he'd made sure that Edward had arrived home unharmed. He still had a good several hours before he would have slept off that celebration.

So Jasper kicked out and connected with the something, hard. It was probably just a rangy mutt snuffling about for some food.

He was just about to slip back into blissful unconsciousness when he felt another soft nudge. With a groan, he cracked an eye and saw a familiar pair of sneakers with the toe of one shoe worn enough for him to see the faint white of a sock.

What was Edward doing in the parking garage?

Jasper opened both eyes and started to blink.

How had Edward found the parking garage?

Jasper sat up quickly.

And promptly regretted it.

"Good morning," Edward said cheerfully.

"What in tarnation are you doing waking me up at this time of morning?" Jasper grumbled, putting a hand over his eyes.

"Can we play music down at the water again today?"

Jasper looked up at Edward's face, which was beaming down at him, and then his eyes flickered to Edward's hands. There was no way that Jasper was going to let Edward play on those fingers today. Or for several more days, for that matter.

Edward needed a break. And they needed to give the current King time to peacefully abdicate his throne. Knowing him, he wouldn't go down without a fight. That's what the fishmongers were for.

"No playing today," Jasper said firmly. If he phrased it any other way, Edward would probably just go home and play for his neighbors.

Instantly, Edward's hopeful expression twisted into panic, and he started babbling. "But I have to play…I can't stop…I…"

Jasper gathered himself to his feet and put a hand on Edward's shoulder.

"No playing today," he repeated. "You and I are going to spend the day together."

And they did.

Not only that day, but the next four days—one for each day that Jasper had pushed Edward so hard that he eventually bled.

During those days, Jasper used some of their recent earnings to take Edward to places in the city he'd never been, nice places. He fed Edward three solid meals a day. He bought Edward a new jacket that wasn't so worn or so big. He bought Edward a new pair of Chucks, which Edward delighted in pointing and staring at.

"So clean," Edward said.

Jasper also ensured that a locksmith stopped by to fully secure the gate to Edward's apartment. No sense in taking needless chances.

Soon enough, Jasper was informed by the fishmongers that he was the new King of the Hill. Although the understanding was that Edward was part of the package, Jasper gave Edward a choice. He told Edward that the hours were long and hard. He told Edward that his fingers would get very tired, although he promised that his fingers would never again bleed. He told Edward that James would still be very mad at him.

Edward listened carefully to Jasper's explanation, green eyes never leaving his face.

"Do you understand?" Jasper asked.

"Yes," Edward answered.

"Do you still want to play the music with me?"

"Yes, please."

He'd said _please_. As though Jasper was the one doing him a favor. As if Jasper was capable of making all of Edward's dreams come true.

Jasper did not take this responsibility lightly. He didn't let Edward play all day. He insisted that Edward spend the morning at his customary job at the library. He watched Edward carefully while he played, taking breaks when necessary and packing them up for the day, even prematurely, if Edward's stamina started to wane.

Jasper thought that the fishmongers might complain, that they might grumble about the time restrictions on their rising star. But the restricted doses of Edward had an unprecedented effect on the Pike's Market crowd.

His music was like a subliminal drug that the Seattle populace could not get enough of. The less Edward they got, the more Edward they seemed to want. The fishmongers were making money hand over fist. Jasper was in hog heaven. Edward, of course, remained in his own little world.

Despite the fact that their daily crowd had begun to swell more rapidly than an eye after a left hook, Edward immersed himself fully in his music, playing as obliviously as if he sat in a recital hall full of empty seats.

He played for one person, and one person alone.

If only she would hear.

* * *

While Edward was drowning in music that she might never hear, Bella was drowning in what was left of her life.

Unlike many of the people she'd grown up with in Forks, she had never experimented with mind-numbing substances as a way to dull the boredom of living in such a small town. She had never used any illegal drugs, had barely touched alcohol aside from a couple of whimsical instances with Jake, had never even taken a single drag of a cigarette.

Despite her inexperience, she knew that this must be what withdrawal felt like.

She had dropped Edward cold turkey, and now she was falling, drifting, a kite released to the mercy of the winds, nothing and no one to anchor her. Life was colorless, tasteless, meaningless. She forced herself to make small talk with the people in her classes. She accepted invitations for coffee. She even went out on a few dates with guys who she never called back.

The absence of _him_ was still everywhere she looked.

After a month, she started receiving sporadic voice messages from Jake, like the final kernels popping in a bag of popcorn. She couldn't bring herself to care to find out what his messages said; she deleted them, unheard. He requested that she re-add him as a friend on Facebook. She left him in Facebook purgatory, neither accepting nor declining.

Her bi-weekly conversations with Charlie followed a script that was as monotonous as watching baseball players running around the same diamond again and again.

First base was always, "How's school going?"

"Pretty good. I'm studying for a test this week." Studying for a test. Writing a paper. Making a PowerPoint for an oral presentation.

Second base: "Make any new friends?"

"I went to coffee with some girls from Cognition class." Went to coffee. Attended a study group at the library. Went downstairs for a neighbor meet-and-greet at the ol' pad.

Third base was a gruff, "How's Edward?"

Charlie didn't know that she had stopped seeing Edward after their conversation at Christmas.

"He's fine," she would say. It wasn't a lie; she kept abreast of Edward's non-progress through Dr. Jenks. She knew that Edward had never once asked for her.

Charlie always rounded for home with, "Have you talked to Jake lately?"

"Not lately," Bella would say lightly, and Charlie would fill her in on the latest happenings with the Blacks.

"Jake is laying the foundation for his new garage," Charlie would say. Meeting a couple of potential investors in Port Angeles. Brainstorming for the name that would be painted above the door.

Bella would listen quietly, asking a polite clarifying question if a particular update warranted one. She was treading lightly; Charlie and Billy seemed to almost be taking the break-up harder than she and Jake were. They knew how serious their children had been about each other; they had hoped for shared holidays for many a year to come.

So Bella would listen, would ask her questions, and then would change the subject. Charlie was not fooled. Even though he never said it out loud, he worried about her. He worried about her silence, her single-minded focus, her solitude. His concern was stuffed into the ample silences of their conversation like cotton.

Even Dr. Jenks staged his own mini-intervention, calling her into his office one day and asking her to close the door. They hadn't had a closed-door conversation since her initial interview. Naturally, Bella felt immediately cornered, concerned.

"Is there something you'd like to talk about?" he had asked.

His tone had been kind, but Bella's mind had blanked in terror. She'd thrown herself into her studies and her job in an effort to distract herself from what her life lacked. She couldn't think of a single reason why Dr. Jenks might be dissatisfied with her performance in his program. She didn't even want to think about what might happen if she didn't have her work in the lab to keep her fingers and mind numb.

"I'm sorry. Am I doing something wrong? Have there been some complaints?"

Dr. Jenks had blinked at her owlishly, clearly not expecting her answer. "No. Of course not. Your work ethic is extraordinary. I've merely noticed that you stopped attending Edward's check-ins."

Oh. That. "Yeah, I just…can't. I've been continuing to log his results and typing up the notes, though. Do you need me to start attending the actual sessions again?"

"No," he'd said slowly. "The staff has it covered. And the sessions will probably be discontinued soon, anyway. I just wanted you to know that I understand." He appraised her for another moment. "I told you once that I'm fond of him, too. I'm truly sorry that the treatment didn't work."

He didn't seem to be apologizing about Edward. He seemed to be apologizing to her.

"Yeah, me too."

When it was clear that he didn't have anything else to discuss, Bella had fairly fled his office.

The conversation with Dr. Jenks had shaken the container into which she had confined her volatile emotions as forcefully as sitting and shimmying on an overfull suitcase to close it. Now, she could feel her anxiety poking through the suitcase seam like an errant sock or shirt—what if she hadn't made the right choice? What if her absence was affecting Edward as strongly as his was affecting hers? What if he needed help with someone else like Mike but had no one to call?

Dr. Jenks had inadvertently given her the push she needed to attend to something that had nagged her since Christmas. She stopped by the library at last, in an afternoon when she knew that _he_ wouldn't be working. She made a slow circuit of the stacks and looked for a boy with a baby face and blue eyes.

She couldn't find him.

Just to be sure, she approached the circulation desk and was greeted by a girl with a smile slightly too big for her face. The name _Jessica_ was blazoned on a cherry-red blouse that didn't quite contain her chest.

"Is Mike around?" Bella asked casually.

Jessica's gaze bisected her from head to toe, and her expression soured. "He doesn't work here anymore."

Bella couldn't prevent herself from smiling, but she turned away to the escalator before she broadcasted her inappropriate satisfaction.

The little scouting mission was successful, but it could not fully dispel the darkness of her doubt and depression. Because school and work could not fill all her hours, Bella spent the rest of her time wandering aimlessly through the Seattle streets. She remembered her prior self, fresh from the forests of Forks, desperately searching for someone who didn't even exist.

Now, she searched again, not even knowing what she was looking for, what she was craving. She only hoped that she could find it—whatever _it_ was—in something other than the guileless face and smile that continued to permeate her being.

Because she had been avoiding the public library since Christmas, Bella had taken to scouting out the used bookstores in the area. One of her fellow bookish classmates had given her a tip about an eclectic used bookstore deep in the bowels of the Pike Market. The next weekend, Bella made the trip, slinking into the market through a back entrance less frequented by tourists.

As she browsed shelves of slowly rotting pages, she was on edge, the air around her skin seeming to vibrate. She skimmed a finger across the names of familiar titles, hoping that one would spark her interest, would jumpstart her dormant heart.

None did. Austen, Shakespeare, Brontë—her oldest friends had somehow lost their appeal. She left the bookstore, her heart and hands empty.

As she stepped from the relative quiet of the shop into a corridor of the market, she heard for the first time the faint sound of music wafting from one of the upper levels. She stopped where she stood, an obstruction in an otherwise free-flowing river, and listened.

The music sounded like poetry. It sounded like hope. It sounded more alive than she'd felt in a long time.

Without understanding what she was doing or why, Bella followed the music. She followed it past vendors hawking Washington-made jewelry, shirts, and tasty treats. Occasionally, she would lose the tendrils of music amidst the hiss of bubbling pots or the caterwauling vendors or the exclamations of tourists.

Then she would turn her body just right, as though she was a delicate radio dial, and the faint tingle of music would again fill her soul like the aroma of warm bread. She couldn't have stopped following its breadcrumbs if she had tried.

As she approached the market's hub, the Fish Market, she noticed that the crowd had grown more viscous, swirling lazily around a point unseen.

But not unheard.

The crowd she was wending through had congregated around the source of the music, which swelled mightily as she stepped from the confines of the market halls into the crisp air. She paused at the crowd's outer radius. From the rich piano sounds coming from the crowd's nexus, she guessed that at least two street performers were engrossed in a piano duel. She'd heard of the concept of dueling pianos but had never seen this type of performance live.

It would have been easiest to listen from the periphery, as she was wont to do, rather than have to fight her way through the crowd between her and the source of the music. But something compelled her to begin working her way slowly through the mess of bodies, the people packed together like cattle.

For a second, she saw a flash of unruly hair the color of fall leaves. Only for a second, until heads and shoulders shifted to obscure her view. For a second, she allowed herself to think—to hope—that the unruly hair she had seen was obscuring the purest of green eyes.

Rationally, she knew that Edward couldn't possibly be sitting in front of Pike's Market playing an elaborate piano duet. Rationally, she knew that a man whose intelligence had flat-lined at the first-grade level was not capable of producing the complex, layered sounds that she was hearing.

But viscerally, she wanted it to be him more than anything in the world. At the thought, her body immediately reacted—her skin heated and her heart came alive and her toes dug in to the soles of her shoes. This wasn't the first time that she had allowed herself to hope. This wasn't the first time that she'd glimpsed a wan face or an awkward stride or a pair of worn Chucks curled together like nestled doves.

Each time, her body reacted as though she had tempted it with her own personal narcotic. Edward was an addiction she couldn't quite recover from. She was not even sure that she wanted to. She deserved the constant pain and ache of withdrawal—it helped remind her that she was the one who had voluntarily stepped out of his life.

Each time she thought she had seen him walking down a Seattle sidewalk or the halls of UW or the myriad of other settings in which she continued to be haunted by his ghost, she felt compelled to follow, craning her neck awkwardly to verify that it was not, indeed, him—just as she would do now.

To get to the front of the crowd, she had to channel her inner football player, dig deep to find more dominant body language than she regularly displayed. Scarcely breathing, she pushed past rows of onlookers, her speed increasing as her distance from the music decreased. And then she was standing in the clear, nothing but charged ions of air separating her from the pianist that every cell in her body wished was Edward.

Every cell in her body was disappointed.

It wasn't him.

The pianist on her right was a grizzled blonde, and his charismatic blue eyes swept the audience to both gauge and engage like every seasoned presenter.

But it was the other pianist whose unruly hair had captured her attention. It was the other pianist whose music had drawn her forth from the depths of the marketplace. In stark contrast to his partner, he seemed unaware of his audience; he seemed unaware that his music was drawing people like weary travelers to a desert oasis. His body was swaying so wildly as he pounded the keys that his long hair was a tornado around his face, obscuring his eyes, his nose, his cheeks. She didn't know how he could even see the keys.

His spontaneous movements were like nothing she'd ever seen. Watching him, she could almost believe that he _was_ music, that music's soul had grown a backbone and arms and legs and was sitting in front of a keyboard on a three-legged stool in the middle of the Emerald City. She was mesmerized.

He was losing himself in his music; she was losing herself in him.

Bella couldn't say how long the euphoria of the music continued. She felt as though she had heard this song her entire life and would continue hearing it long after the pianist had stopped playing.

Eventually, he did stop. His partner played a final climactic riff, and they both ended on a deep bass note. The low note reverberated in the air for a moment, a deep gong, and then went silent.

The crowd went wild.

Bella realized that she wasn't the only one who had been entranced by the young pianist; he had been playing all of them just as effectively as he had played the keys.

He'd played their collective hearts, their souls, drawing on some unifying strand that made them all human. Even if they didn't like the song he was playing, they couldn't help but react to the honesty and innocence in his performance. And they responded in the only way possible—they opened up their pockets and pocketbooks and poured money into a tip jar that was already overflowing, its size inadequate to contain the ample fruits of the young pianist's talent.

She wondered if the pianist was aware of the power he held in the palms of his hands.

When he at last straightened up and flipped his head back to dislodge the hair from his eyes, at last revealing his face, Bella knew for certain that he was not aware of his own power. She knew from experience that the pianist in question was aware of very little that most people would consider important.

She knew these things because the pianist in question was Edward after all.

Bella's knees gave out, and she sank to the concrete because standing was no longer an option. She perched on her knees, staring up at this Edward that she hadn't recognized.

She hadn't recognized him because there was no way that she could have. She hadn't recognized him because his hair was longer, his frame was thinner. She hadn't recognized him because her Edward was awkward, ungainly, all elbows and knees and inward-turned feet. She hadn't recognized him because her Edward wore a ratty, outdated jacket that was almost three sizes too big. And she hadn't recognized him because her Edward could not play the piano like he was channeling the ghosts of Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach.

But it was indeed her Edward.

Her Edward's unkempt hair had been the cyclone that had obscured the young pianist's face. Her Edward's strong fingers had commanded such sounds out of the instrument in front of him. And now, her Edward's bright eyes fluttered to hers.

The intensity of his gaze was like the first rush of a needle in her vein.

* * *

Of all the days in his life, this was another that Edward would remember—the day the music brought Miss Bella back to him at last.

In his memory, this day would not be blue. If he had some paint in front of him, right now, he would ignore the little blue circle, choosing instead the red and yellow and green and slopping them on his canvas in broad, delighted strokes. He would paint a rainbow. He would mix the happy colors to make the perfect shade of brown—the color of Miss Bella's dappled eyes.

He'd looked up from playing, and her eyes were shining up at him like two permanent stars in his night's sky. The yellow sun was shining down upon her and through her, her fair skin awash with light and her rich hair glinting as it cascaded down her shoulders.

She was the sun, and he needed to paint a rainbow in her sky. But because he didn't have paints, because he didn't have any other way of expressing the wild abandon that ran through his veins, he stared at her for one more second.

He begged her with his eyes not to disappear.

When he blinked, when he looked back to find her face raised to his still, only then did he look down at his keys, his friends, his painters of sound.

He smiled a soft, secret smile.

And then he began to play—a song that burst from inside of his soul.


	16. A symphony on skin

**Note:** This chapter required some time to come to an appropriate boil. Hope you like.

* * *

Jasper tipped precariously on one leg of his stool and stared.

In his time on the streets, he'd known a lot of great musicians, many of whom did not play on the streets because they were homeless. They were homeless because they were compelled to play on the streets. There was nowhere else they could go.

Jasper had thought he'd heard it all. He'd tapped his foot to the most frolicking of country, mourned with the most soulful of blues, and done the robot to the most alien of techno. He'd even sat through a bizarre _Ode to Cat_ that sounded like nails on a chalkboard.

But the song that Edward was playing was something else, something that didn't fit neatly into any particular musical genre. The melody was unbearably sweet, yet the chord progressions diametrically somber. This music made Jasper want to both laugh and weep, to smile and gnash his teeth, to leap and fall. Many in the audience felt the same, eyes misty and smiles trembling.

Jasper could only assume that Edward's muse was this girl sitting in front of them. He had watched her approach, a ripple of harsh movement through the otherwise still pond of the onlookers. As he always did when he played, he scanned the crowd often to gauge their reaction to the performance, adjusting the pacing or the song accordingly if their attention seemed to wane. He had always been able to read people's reactions to his music as easily as he could flip through a discarded Sunday paper.

Of course, Edward's talent fairly negated his ability. They were several hours into their performance, and Edward was unfurling like a leaf in the sun. In this crowd, the attention didn't seem to wane. Money sprinkled the concrete in front of their pianos like fairy dust. Every thirty minutes, Jasper paused to sweep it into a black trash bag, like he would common garbage.

Although it wasn't necessary, Jasper still watched the crowd, if nothing else to see them experience Edward in all his glory. Because he was watching, he had seen the brunette approaching. Upon initial inspection, the girl was nothing special—her jaw and teeth were too prominent for his tastes; her hair and chest a little too flat. Nevertheless, her still form continued to draw his eyes like it was reeling in a fish. Perhaps it was because the girl was looking at Edward like she'd been searching for him her whole life.

The song Jasper and Edward were playing—_Brown-Eyed Girl_, appropriately enough—was coming to its natural conclusion, and Jasper finished it off with a rapid chromatic scale. He watched as Edward lowered trembling fingers to his lap. The kid had clearly reached the limit of his stamina; time to wrap it up, then. As Jasper shifted to begin collecting their final tips, Edward shook his head like he was coming out of a trance, his bangs parting with the movement to reveal his tired, over-stimulated eyes.

A beat after Edward exposed his face to the sun, an anomalous movement in Jasper's periphery caused him to look over in time to see the girl sink bonelessly to the street, her face stunned. She sat looking up at Edward as if in supplication. When Edward actually acknowledged her, when Edward stared at her and smiled, Jasper finally realized who this muse was.

Miss Bella, he presumed.

She was nothing like he had imagined. Edward spoke of her as a dear friend, someone who hung out with him and listened to him and was very pretty. Jasper had thought for sure that she was like Edward—a little slow, a little different, probably a little less than pretty. But the girl in front of him seemed like your average college student. Despite her ordinary appearance, she had a certain spark, a certain confident-casual vibe.

Jasper was distracted from his frank appraisal when Edward raised his hands again and began to play.

Up to this point, Edward had shown an eidetic memory for sound, an unparalleled ability to mimic others' genius. He had shown that he was able to improvise around a melody that another artist had created. However, he had never shown any inclination to create music of his own, never shown that he possessed any particular genius.

He was showing his genius now.

Jasper had heard a lot of music, but he'd never heard music like this.

* * *

The music surrounded Bella like an invisible throng of midnight fireflies, glittering just out of sight, indescribably beautiful. It _was_ Edward. Edward had remembered her. Edward smiled at her. Edward was playing this otherworldly melody.

Edward's music swept her up and twisted her around like a cyclone of sound.

She vaguely registered that those around her were equally as stunned; she heard muttered curses and exclamations from the crowd. Even Edward's fellow musician was frozen where he sat. They were dumbstruck by the music, this glorious music. But only she truly knew what they were hearing.

He was playing _himself_.

He was playing Edward.

They were hearing Edward's story. They were hearing the story of his lonely childhood. They were hearing about the ridicule of his peers, the scorn of his family, treatment he had only recently begun to understand. And then, when the melody changed and began dancing and singing, trilling in the high notes, they were hearing _her_—they were hearing Bella. They were hearing Edward meet her, share his life with her, tell her little things about his day, like how pretty the sun had looked over the mountains as he was walking to work and which books had been the hardest to re-shelve and what joke Emmett had told that had made him laugh.

And then they were hearing Bella gone. They were hearing Edward notice that his one, true friend in the world had decided not to be his friend anymore. When she left, the music grew almost physically painful. It seemed to punch into their guts and rip out their intestines. Then the music trailed off on a miscellaneous fifth note, unresolved and anxious.

In the resounding emptiness, they heard the smothering silence of the book stacks and the rumble of surf on an empty stretch of sand. Just as the silence was becoming unbearable, the last lingering, incomplete note worming through their skin and into their heart, the music crashed back in, crescendoing into a sunny day on the Seattle streets—today.

They were hearing her come back.

They were hearing what he was seeing right now, with Bella sitting before him in the sun.

They were hearing Edward's happily ever after.

In that moment, she wished a happily ever after for him, for them, so badly she could almost taste it. In her mind, she was seeing Edward at the climax of a fairy tale—the child she'd thought forever trapped in a man's body transforming before her very eyes, becoming the prince she'd always hoped for amid a storm of magical, musical sparks. The music he was playing was even the perfect backdrop.

She tried not to think about the fact that fairy tales—_real_ fairy tales—rarely had a happy ending.

She tried not to think about Alice.

When Edward had finished playing, when he'd finished telling her his story in the only way that he could, he folded his hands in his lap. He looked up at her—looked right at her—and spoke in a voice so low, so intimate that only she could hear.

"That was for you," he said. "Your very own lullaby."

The crowd remained silent, stunned and beaten and bruised, dashed to the lowest of lows yet simultaneously stretched to the highest of highs. When they at last caught the breath that Edward had yanked from their lungs, they began to clap, individual peals that grew into rolling thunder.

Edward ignored the crowd. He ignored the sound of their adulation, their shouted and whistled encouragement. He ignored the ones who surged forward, intent on thanking him or touching him, they didn't even know which. Instead, he slipped around them and walked straight to where Bella was crouched, her legs trembling both from the strain of sitting and from the implications of this impossible music.

"Will you go with me?" he said, eyes on his new sneakers, as though he was uncertain of her answer.

"Anywhere," she said.

He didn't even have to ask. She had found him again; she would follow him wherever he would have her go.

* * *

Edward led her to a decaying apartment building in Belltown, dark and squatty with bars covering its lower windows like gaudy fake lashes. As they had walked, Bella had moved mechanically, barely noting the passing shops or people, barely noting the ground under her feet or the sky above.

She only had eyes for Edward.

She watched him carefully, mentally comparing this new Edward to the old Edward, as if inspecting a reproduced painting to ensure quality against the original. The changes were small, but they were significant. For example, he didn't race in front of her, he didn't look at his feet, and he didn't smile blithely at everyone they passed. Instead, he kept pace with her steps; he glanced at her face from time to time; he only smiled at _her_.

And he stepped on the cracks in the sidewalk.

Even as she noted these differences, even as her heart both leapt and sank at the implications, she couldn't help but notice gratefully that not everything had changed. His smile was still impossibly bright. He still treated her like she was the center of his universe. And he still babbled. As they walked, Edward seemed to be making up for lost time, telling her everything, significant or otherwise, that she'd missed since she'd been gone.

"…and Jasper bought me this amazing music maker and I helped him become the King and he's been letting me play with him every day down by the fish because he said that you would hear the music and he was right so I should probably thank him someday…"

She was too overwhelmed to interject to ask questions, like who was Jasper and how he was a king and why he'd known that she would hear Edward's music. She was too overwhelmed by the all-consuming question that ran like a stock ticker through her mind.

_What have we done?_

When they arrived in front of a peeling black gate, Edward beamed fondly at her, proud to be showing her this final piece of himself—where he lived. And she had thought that Rosalie's condo was bleak.

"This is my room," he said eagerly, pushing open a rusted green door.

She was hesitant to step inside, afraid of what she would find.

But she did.

Bits of music dotted Edward's apartment like shrapnel. A cinderblock bookshelf sagged under stacks of yellowed sheet music and dog-eared books about music theory, the dregs of a thrift store barrel. A waist-high tower of CDs leaned against a frayed love seat. Other discs, tapes, and records were scattered about the floor. Even a phonograph perched in one corner like a gargoyle.

After ushering her inside, Edward wrestled open the single, fogged window and slung his backpack from his shoulders. He began setting up his keyboard on the wall, diligently laying it on its stand.

"Do you mind if I play?" he asked hopefully, and she shook her head no.

Plucking a few sheets of paper from one of the many available stacks, he sat down and began to play. On their trek to his home, Edward's hands had twitched and quivered, likely from the exhaustion of playing to the crowds for several hours that day—or perhaps from the emotional effort of baring his soul through her lullaby. But here he was, continuing to play—for her. The song was one she didn't recognize. It sounded classical. It sounded difficult. It sounded like the dawning of a new era.

Yet it also sounded like the ending of an old one.

_What have we done?_

As she continued her visual exploration of his apartment, Bella quickly realized that the veneer of music failed to cloak what lay beneath. If her apartment was the shape of a shoebox, Edward's was no more than a jail cell. She could probably pace it off in less than a minute. And while she at least had a partition wall between her bedroom and kitchen/living area, Edward enjoyed no such luxury. He had propped a thin foam mattress against the peeling wallpaper a few feet from the 1970s refrigerator. Most of the doors on the pre-fab kitchen cabinets were missing, although a couple still hung drunkenly from broken hinges. The kitchen shelves were also littered with CDs and sheet music with only the occasional soup can interspersed.

What did he eat? Was he so wrapped up in his musical madness that he was forgetting to purchase food? Bella wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer, although from the looks of his apartment and his skin stretched tightly across his frame, it wasn't hard to guess.

Maybe Edward wasn't playing for her right now after all. Maybe he couldn't help himself.

The beauty of his music might well be hiding an ugly truth.

_Oh, Edward. What have we done to you?_

Easing carefully around a pair of roaches pointing unmoving legs at the ceiling, Bella opened the refrigerator with trepidation but was spared the sight of decomposing cheese or a similar science experiment that she would have expected given the state of the rest of the apartment. Instead, a single bottle of ketchup sat forlornly in the middle of an empty refrigerator, without even a squatty mustard container to keep it company. A small trail of ketchup had dripped down the side of the bottle and pooled on the clear shelf, vaguely reminiscent of dried blood.

Closing the refrigerator with a suction snap, Bella knew what she had to do. She had abandoned Edward when he very well might have needed her most. She had failed to notice the changes in him.

Now, she would do what she could.

Placing a hand briefly on Edward's shoulder, she let him know that she would be back in a little while. At her declaration, Edward whirled from his keyboard in alarm.

"Don't…leave," he stuttered.

"I promise I'll be right back."

His fingers clenched and unclenched over the keys as if they couldn't quite decide what to grab.

"Promise?" he said at last, his brow furrowed.

"Yes."

He didn't seem to believe her.

She didn't blame him.

Edward made no move to stop her, but he remained poised on the edge of his seat with his hands grasping at air, staring at her forlornly. As she hurried from his apartment, the sounds of a Chopin nocturne accompanied her like a funeral's dirge.

She hurried faster.

Within thirty minutes, she was standing again in front of door 108, clutching a heavy paper sack in each arm. She could hear the muffled sounds of Edward still pounding at his keyboard, playing yet another elaborate piece she didn't recognize. After ineffectually shifting the weight of each bag in an effort to free up two fingers to work the handle, she finally gave up and kicked the door with her sneaker.

The music stopped mid-scale, the door cracked, and Edward peeked around at her with his head cocked. In the evening's fading light, his eyes were bruised purple with exhaustion, although they came to life when they landed on her face. Long ago, he hadn't helped her pick up scattered folders from the floor of Dr. Jenks' office. Now, he held out his arms to take one of the grocery bags without even being asked.

As she was pushing her bag onto the countertop, scattering CDs to the floor in its wake, one of Edward's hands shot into her line of vision and plucked an apple out of the top of her bag. It was a shiny green apple that had stood out in a display of otherwise red delicious apples. Although she had not intended to buy fruit, the lonely green apple in a sea of red had somehow reminded her of him.

Edward made short work of the apple while she unloaded cleaning supplies from one of the bags. As she lined up the bottles like little soldiers, she was startled to hear the sound of something scraping across the floor. She looked back to see Edward swiveling the edge of his keyboard away from the wall. When he sat down with a flourish on his rickety chair, she realized that he was orienting himself toward her. He was no longer staring at the wall; he was staring at her.

Bella tried to distract herself from the kryptonite of his gaze. Since the first moment she'd met him, he had been her weakness; for the first time, she acknowledged that it was a weakness she no longer wanted to fight.

For the next hour, Edward played an appropriately rousing soundtrack for her cleaning activities. As she scrubbed, he pounded rapid octaves across the black keys. As she wiped, he swiped his fingers across the white. After she exhausted every cleaning tool in her arsenal on every available surface, she turned her attention to the next pressing need—food. She scoured the lower cabinets for cooking supplies and unearthed a skillet that had clearly seen better days and a dented pot that she wasn't sure would hold water. Nevertheless, she brandished them to Edward like she'd just pulled a sword from stone. His lip curled in response, and he played a triumphant scale.

Almost as though he'd understood the metaphor.

As she cooked, she glanced over to see green eyes peeking at her from between his hair. Each time, her face and neck grew unexpectedly hot, and she was the first to break eye contact. She wasn't sure that he ever looked away, although she assumed that some of the complicated key patterns required him to at least glance back at his hands.

When the food was ready, she spread a makeshift picnic on the floor in front of the keyboard, creating their own little meadow in the tangled wilderness of music surrounding them. Edward ate his chicken quesadilla reverently and thoroughly—just as he had the apple.

When he had done everything but lick his plate clean, they sat facing each other, still at last, until he broke the long silence.

"Thank you," he said simply.

Although she knew he was talking about the food, he was also talking about so much more.

"Edward," she began, needing to know what he was thinking, wanting to understand if the music was an early messenger of a broader metamorphosis. She had so many questions. Had the treatment worked after all? Why hadn't anyone noticed? Had his intelligence increased along with his musical ability? But more importantly, was he going to become like Alice? Was he becoming so consumed with his music that, even now, he was already slipping away? Would the sweet, innocent Edward be lost forever?

So many questions, but she didn't get a chance to pose any of them. Instead, she was silenced by a single, warm finger on her lip.

It was Edward's finger.

Edward's finger was touching her lip. Edward had just voluntarily touched her with his finger. His finger was touching her, was perched on her lip as lightly as a bird hovering in the air.

"Please," he whispered. He was staring straight at her lips, his eyes imploring. To do what, she could not know. Maybe he had something to say first. Maybe he was asking her to be still. Maybe he was asking her to be quiet.

Maybe he was asking to kiss her.

She hardly dared hope.

"Please what?" she whispered back.

"Don't make me talk," he said. "I can't…" He shook his head sadly. He couldn't what? Speak? Answer her questions? Express himself?

"We don't have to talk," Bella said, speaking carefully into his touch. "What do you want to do instead?"

For a moment, he didn't answer. Instead, he seemed focused on his finger, mesmerized. The smallest amount of skin, and yet it was igniting the most extraordinary of fires in the pit of her stomach.

Then he said, "Let me play."

Bella's spirits plummeted, the fire doused. With those three words, Edward had confirmed her suspicions about his musical madness. For the first several weeks after Alice had responded to the treatment, they'd hardly been able to pry her away from her computer, the source of data that her mind so craved. If Edward had indeed responded to the treatment, if he'd responded in a musical fashion rather than an intellectual one, then it was probable that he craved his keyboard more than anything else in the world.

"Okay," Bella said, trying to hide her disappointment as she drew up one leg to stand. "Don't let me stop you…"

He stopped _her_. He grabbed her elbow so quickly that she didn't have a chance to move.

"No," he said, shaking his head more vehemently.

She missed the feel of his skin on her lips.

He said, "You don't understand."

She didn't understand any of this.

He said, "Let me play _you_."

Not the keyboard.

He wanted to play _her_.

Before today, he'd never voluntarily touched her, had never voluntarily touched anyone except occasionally when presented with a high five. He'd scooted slightly away from her on a bus seat, had not even held out a hand when she stumbled down a perilous path, had pulled his hand from Alice's stubborn grasp.

Yet he now he wanted to _play_ her.

She knew that she should say no, that, despite what she'd hoped, this would be taking advantage of him at a crucial point in his life when he was expanding, changing. He didn't know what he wanted. He probably didn't even understand what he was asking. She should definitely say no. Just one shake of her head, that's all it would take.

She didn't say no.

Instead, her heart fluttering, she sank back down in front of him and brushed her hair back from her face, exposing herself to whatever it was that he was going to do.

Edward smiled that shy smile again, the one she'd first seen before he'd composed her very own lullaby. And then he started to play. He put his single, gentle forefinger back on her chapped bottom lip. Her mouth parted at the sensation, Bella watched Edward's expression as he scraped her lip with his fingernail, his pupils dilating like they had the day Jacob bloodied his nose, the day he'd watched as she cleaned bloody violence from his flesh. She wondered if he'd been thinking about touching her then as well.

His finger was like a thin, warbling note of a piccolo, tracing a delicate note around the full circuit of her lips. He tentatively added more fingers to the orchestra of his touch; other digits joined in like instruments in warm up for their big performance, ghosting random patterns over her cheek, her jaw, her nose.

Bella felt stretched as tightly as the skin across the face of a drum. Too many thoughts, questions, emotions, feelings, memories, and doubts whirled together in her head—she thought she might come undone. With a shaky breath, she closed her eyes and just let herself _feel_. As her eyes closed, she opened herself to Edward's music, baring her soul to the symphony he was composing on her skin.

A finger swept across the harp of her eyelashes.

Two fingers drew like bows across the tip of her nose.

Three fingers trilled up the piano keys of her jaw.

Each note, each touch that seeped into her skin was soft, innocent, pure. Yet each one seemed to vibrate through her quivering insides, igniting a blaze the likes of which she'd never felt in her two decades. No one had ever touched her like this before, like she was the most precious thing in the world, like every inch of her deserved to be explored reverently and thoroughly. The purity of Edward's touch only added to the impurity of her thoughts.

Then she lost all thought entirely when Edward reached the crown of her head, his fingers slip-gliding into her hair. He made a low noise in his throat, and Bella made one right back. The sensation was indescribable—burning, tingling, wanting. His hands in her hair were the ultimate crescendo—the vibration of a thousand stringed instruments thrumming in glorious tandem, building into something as yet unknown, unheard. But undoubtedly something wonderful.

She opened her eyes to see Edward staring at her hair reverently, stroking the locks from root to tip, winding them around his fingers, letting them tumble through loose fists. Only after he'd given her hair as much consideration as her face did he rest his conductor's hands, cupping the back of her neck and bringing his forehead down to hers. He exhaled shakily, and she could smell the sour apple on his tongue.

His mouth was _right there_ and she couldn't do anything but breathe. She couldn't do anything but stare into his eyes, which were dark with a peculiar shade of hunger, one that no amount of food could satisfy.

"Play _me_," he said eventually, his voice rough, strained.

They sat staring at each other, just breathing.

And his mouth was _right there_.

His eyes implored her.

_Play me_, they said. Show me that I'm alive and that I'm a man and that I'm worthy of your touch, your care, your love. Show me why you came back. Show me that you'll stay.

She knew that this had already gone too far, that it was too much, too soon, too quick. She had just gotten him back, had just found him again, and she knew little to nothing about what was happening to him.

But his mouth was _right there_.

His lips looked warm.

She knew what he was asking. He was asking her to mimic his actions—trace his lips, smudge the bags under his eyes, soothe his tangled mess of hair. Discover his body, save his soul, reassure him that everything was going to be okay.

She knew exactly what he was asking. Yet she also knew exactly what she wanted.

And it was _right there_.

She stopped thinking, doubting, or second-guessing. Instead, she took what she wanted. His lips were as warm as they looked, and soft and silk besides.

Edward gasped into her mouth and went very still, his hands limp behind her head, no longer curling the hair at the base of her neck in tandem with the curl in her belly.

Bella kissed him, softly sucking and soothing, saying with her lips what she could not say to him in words.

Edward remained very still, although his mouth parted for hers when she asked.

With the tip of her tongue, she traced the outline of his lips.

Edward remained very still.

Exploring deeper past the boundaries of his lips, she found an errant incisor, which she sucked.

Edward sucked in a breath.

Without breaking contact, Bella rose to her knees, pushed forward, and wound her hands in his hair for the first time.

Edward was still no longer.

He surged against her at last, the perfect counterpoint, lips and hands and tongue eager and warm and hot and playing her in a way that was so much more than playing. It was living and learning and loving. This kiss was not gentle, it was the crashing of cymbals, the heavy beating of a heart's drum, teeth and noses knocking together in their haste, hair pulled, limbs scrambling for slipping purchase.

In its very discord, the kiss was beauty—a sustained note clashing against another so closely that the two can scarce be distinguished. In the heat and need and climax of the moment, Bella never wanted it to end, she wished that the soundtrack of their lives, of this moment, might loop endlessly.

But, as with all moments, all symphonies, this one also came to an end.

For in only a moment, Edward gave a strangled cry and pushed back fiercely, his face drained of blood, eyes squeezed shut in some unknown agony. Before Bella could react, before she could steady him with her hands or her words, he flailed backward, knocking over the tower of CDs, the cases scattering to the floor like shards of glass.

His mouth was no longer right there. It was far away and alone and open in a silent cry.

_What have I done?_

_What have I done?_

_What have I done?_

_What have I done?_

_What have I done?_

_What have I done?_

"I'm sorry!" Bella cried, a hand over her mouth. "I'm so sorry, Edward. I didn't mean to…"

But there was nothing she could say.

Her beating heart, which had so compelled her, now condemned her.

Months ago, she had been floored, outraged that Jacob would have accused her of taking advantage of Edward. Now, she had done just that. Regardless of the fact that some crucial key in his brain had turned after the treatment, causing him to become some sort of musical genius, he was still clearly a child in every other way that mattered. He couldn't understand what he—what they—had been doing. For all she knew, he'd merely been fascinated by the feel of her hair, her skin under his fingers. He had been playing with a porcelain doll; he was still unable to comprehend the living, breathing woman.

Edward huddled on the couch, knees drawn up defensively, feet curled inward, head buried in his forearms. Gone was the confident conductor, the artiste, the virtuoso. Gone was the new Edward, eclipsed by the old—a sea shell with the last of its secret music drained away into sucking sand.

With her kiss, she had consumed.

Bella pushed up and stood poised where he'd abandoned her, uncertain what she'd done, uncertain what she could do to help him, uncertain if she should stay—but loathe to leave. Distressed, she swayed into the nearby keyboard, her palms digging into it for balance, generating the perfect auditory complement to the cacophony of the situation.

Edward cowered back from the harsh sound, likely misinterpreting its origin, likely misconstruing its intent. Immediately, Bella pulled away from the keyboard as though it had scorched her palms, slapping at the power button until its evil red eye winked out.

Quiet descended on the room like snowflakes in the night.

Bella didn't know what to do, but she knew someone who might. This time, she wouldn't run away without asking. This time, she would give him the choice.

"Tell me what to do, Edward," she said. "Tell me how I can help you."

_Please_.

But Edward did not answer. Perhaps there was nothing she could to. Perhaps he truly needed to be alone, to rest, to sleep. Perhaps she could come back tomorrow, when the sun had risen and thawed the earth, when sleep had dulled their memory of her sin.

Bella stepped back to hover by the door, but she did not yet reach for the handle.

"Should I go?" she whispered. "Should I come back tomorrow?"

Still, Edward did not answer. He was frozen, rocking slightly, locked in some endless loop of his own.

Bella fumbled for the door knob, her fingers twisting loosely around cool brass as guilt twisted her heart. Just as she had decided to open the door, just as her fingers began gripping and turning, Edward spoke at last.

"Could you stay with me?" he said. His voice was muted, muffled by his head buried in his arms. It was the same question he'd asked her the day of his second treatment. The same question he'd asked when he knew he would be facing pain that he was unwilling to face alone. The same question he'd asked when he'd been willing to face that pain—for her. He hadn't wanted her to leave then, and he didn't want to her to leave now, despite whatever trauma she'd unknowingly inflicted.

So she didn't. In two steps, she was seated next to Edward on the little sofa. She touched him, but not as a woman touches a man—instead, as a soul comforts its other half. At the feel of her hand on his, the feel of her hair on his arm, Edward leaned into her with a sound that was half sob, half sigh.

They sat curled together like two halves of a whole, and Bella quietly told Edward her own story. She couldn't make it into a lullaby, she couldn't play it for him in the way that he could best understand, but she could be honest. She could tell him their very own fairy tale. She told him about a girl who was alone in a strange land, about the man who'd saved her life, about her search for that man. About finding him, losing him, and finding him again.

About how, now that she'd found him, she'd never let him go.

As she talked, Edward's breathing calmed, his eyes raising to find her face, his cheek soft against her arm.

Since the first day that she'd met him, perhaps even before then, he'd been the harmony to her life's melody. Although it had taken her far too long to hear him amidst the white noise of her life, she was listening now, her inner ear fully trained on the delicate notes of Edward's life.

At the end of her story, Edward sighed again, but this time there was no sob. There was no sadness. There was only joy. Edward had listened to her story, and he'd understood. For this one moment, everything was right and good and perfect. The type of moment she wished she could freeze and stick in her pocket as easily as a Polaroid picture.

But she knew, as she sat with her arms around this man and gazed through his cracked window into the sliver of starry sky, that Edward was not hers. His music, his inexplicable, unadulterated music, belonged to the world. Despite every instinct she had, she could not keep him all to herself. She could not hide his light beneath her protective, cupped hands.

Soon, everything would change.

Soon, she would have to alert Dr. Jenks and his team that they had been wrong, that the failed treatment had not failed after all.

Soon, Edward would no longer be her emerald in the rough. He would be inspected and tested and faceted and polished into the ultimate gem—proudly displayed on a pedestal as proof of a medical miracle. He would no longer belong to her; he would belong to the world.

But for now, she curled around her Edward to sleep, pretending that she was a human blanket, that she could wrap him in her arms, that she could shut out the world and never let him go.

This night, her dreams were filled with Edward Cullen. This night, she was not denied his face.


	17. Awake

Bella sat watching Edward sleep.

She'd risen before the sun, feeling disoriented and stiff, having migrated away from him to her own side of the love seat sometime during the night. As soon as her eyes opened, she'd found him curled into the arm rest, legs and arms tucked protectively into his body.

As she'd hoped it would, sleep had run its gentle hand over the landscape of his face, smoothing his worried brow, softening his features, releasing his clenched jaw. Even his hair, which had been made tumultuous by both music and hands, lay gently across his forehead.

As she watched, he didn't shift, didn't move, didn't cry out. But she couldn't look away. He looked so young, so pure, so peaceful. His skin was so pale and smooth that she could almost envision him as an inanimate statue of the purest marble. She could almost imagine that if she touched him, he would feel cool and hard under her fingertips.

But she didn't touch him.

Instead, she merely watched. And as dawn crept slowly up his face, Bella saw the marble statue wake up. The sun kissed his lips more thoroughly than she had been able. It warmed color into his cheeks, tickled his flaring nostrils, ignited his skin. Eventually, his eyelids slit, revealing irises washed pale yellow by the morning's glow. Edward winced and shifted at last.

Bella almost cringed away, uncertain what he would feel, what he would think to find her here. Then he smiled at her, a smile tinged with sleep and wonder. Bathed in the brilliance of his eyes, Bella felt dull. She could feel her tangled hair, the sweat on her skin, the chicken quesadilla on her breath.

As if reading her thoughts, Edward said, "You're beautiful." He said the words so simply, so honestly, Bella couldn't help but believe him. "And you stayed," he added.

"Yes." She smiled at his contentment, at his clear affection.

"Oh!" Abruptly, he pushed himself to sit on the edge of the couch. His hand nearly brushed her socked foot, and her arch tingled. "I have a surprise for you. Can you close your eyes?"

She marveled at his way of asking rather than demanding. Bella nodded and did as he'd asked. The last thing she saw before scrunching her eyes closed was his face, glowing with excitement and the sun. She heard him get up and pad into the kitchen, followed by the creak of cabinets and the rustling of plastic. Then she heard the distinct sound of cereal being poured.

"Wake up," Edward said, suddenly close. He was balancing two bowls of what looked like Cheerios on his arm. "Breakfast in bed," he said proudly, extending a bowl to her. She wondered where he'd ever heard of the concept.

Together, they balanced bowls on their knees and broke the night's fast. Edward seemed to be as fascinated watching her eat as she had been watching him sleep. He never took his eyes from her face.

Tomorrow had arrived, and Bella knew what she had to do. She knew that she should put down her spoon, pick up her phone, and call Dr. Jenks. She knew it, but she absolutely didn't want to do it. Instead, she focused on eating every last O in her bowl. They were slightly stale, relics in Edward's apartment from before her shopping spree, but she didn't care. Edward had made her breakfast in bed.

"Would you come with me to work today?" he asked, hopeful. He had eaten his breakfast in a fraction of the time that she had and devoted the deficit to staring at her unabashedly while she thought about their uncertain future.

Bella just looked at him for a moment. Selfishly, impulsively, she wanted to merely say yes, to agree as readily as she had the day he'd asked her the same question at a bus stop, to effortlessly slip back into their comfortable routine.

Instead, she forced herself to say, "I think maybe we should go and see Dr. Jenks today."

Edward cocked his head curiously. "But I don't go see the doctor until Friday."

Friday.

Edward's weekly check-ins were on Friday.

And it was only Monday.

Bella remained silent for long time, focusing on fishing every last Cheerio out of the milk. Unlike Charlie, she'd never been a particularly good at fishing, so the final O that she pulled from the bowl was soft and swollen.

She knew she should put down her spoon and pick up her phone. But she didn't want to. For the first time since waking up, she felt hope. Edward had gone undiscovered for this long; surely it couldn't hurt for him to fly under Dr. Jenks' radar for a few more days. She told herself that, over those days, she could observe him more fully, the better to more accurately report on the changes she'd already seen in him.

With an emphatic _plink_, Bella put down her spoon.

But she didn't pick up her phone.

* * *

In the ensuing days, Bella watched Edward _really_ wake up.

Watching him wake from sleep in the sun had been beauty. Watching him wake to the world around him was something beyond. She had thought that they would fall back into the routine that they had shared before she had chosen to walk out of his life. She was wrong. That routine could no longer exist. That routine could no longer be routine because Edward was no longer Edward.

Over the ensuing days, Bella hit all the highlights of Edward's new life. Some of it was as she had remembered from their previous time together. Edward still worked in the library. He ate at _Joe's_. He rode the bus to get wherever he needed to go.

It was as she remembered—but it was also so much more.

In the library, Edward worked twice as quickly, effortlessly re-shelving books without consulting his alphabetical reference card once. When he finished an hour before his shift was scheduled to end, he turned to her with a sly grin. "Shall I read to you from my new favorite book?"

He wanted to read to her.

He used the word "shall."

He was reading enough to have a new favorite book.

"I would like that very much."

His new favorite book was _Mrs. Frisby and the_ _Rats of Nihm_. As they nestled in a secluded reading corner, Bella listened to Edward read.

After hearing Edward play, after watching his mastery with a piano keyboard, Bella half expected to hear him rattle off the words of the simple child's story with ease. But music was clearly the vocabulary that he knew best. His words, his impressions, his feelings seemed to travel effortlessly from his head straight through his fingers. The connection between his head and mouth, however, remained stilted. As he read, he struggled to pronounce words with multiple syllables or with silent letters.

When he finished the first chapter, Bella asked quietly, "Why is this your favorite book?"

"Because," he said. "Those poor rats."

She knew exactly what he meant. Her memory supplied a single frame—Edward in a lab, surrounded by wires and needles and white.

"And Jonathan is my hero," he continued.

"How so?"

When Edward launched into a stammered explanation of how Jonathan the mouse had been brave enough to save the rats and then had been strong enough to sacrifice himself to save his family, Bella realized that yes, Edward was still having difficulty reading. He was still having difficulty speaking. Unlike the music that flowed from his fingertips, his thoughts did not flow effortlessly off his tongue.

But the thoughts were there. The understanding was there. She could see it in his eyes. Innocence had always been the sheen of his gaze. Now, there was also a subtle patina of awareness, a clarity of understanding that he still lacked the ability to express but that was beginning to slowly accumulate behind his irises like snow behind a hill.

Before, his eyes had been half-empty. Now, they were decidedly half-full—and their level of understanding was rising. Those eyes shifted to look at her, and they were suddenly intense, aware.

"If I had to sacrifice myself to save you, I would," he said.

She wondered if she could say the same.

"Don't worry," she said, not even wanting to think about Edward sacrificing himself for anyone. "I'm pretty sure the only thing you'll have to sacrifice is the skin of your knees as you try to catch me when I fall," Bella joked. She was rewarded with an Edward laugh.

Like his smile, his voice, and his face, Edward's laugh was a beautiful thing, made even more so by its cause. He was laughing because he understood the sarcasm in her voice. He was laughing because he was getting smarter every day. But, most importantly, he was laughing because she was there to see it.

* * *

At _Joe's_, Edward discovered Emmett's little white lie. He and Bella were sitting at one of the red-and-white checkered tables, dining in for a change. As soon as Emmett spotted them stepping through the door, he was around the counter and lifting Edward into a bone-warping hug.

Edward grunted a laugh and immediately gestured toward Bella when he had regained his feet. "Look who I found!"

When he looked over at her, Emmett's gaze had decidedly cooled. "Haven't seen you in a while." Accusation lurked in his tone.

"Yeah, I got a little lost. But I'm here now."

"Good." Emmett looked at her for another moment and smiled broadly in a remarkable demonstration of forgiveness. "As always, Edward here wouldn't shut up about you."

Edward's eyes twinkled; he didn't deny it.

"The usual?" Emmett asked, brandishing his spatula.

"Yes," Edward said. "Except today, we'd like to dine in."

To her, he whispered, "It's a date." His breath warmed her neck.

As they sat hoisting their oversized subs to their mouths, Edward froze mid-bite. He was staring at the lady at the check-out stand. She was clutching her brown paper sack and was holding out her hand for change.

"What is it?" Bella asked, wondering if Edward recognized the lady.

But that wasn't it. "The food here really isn't free after noon, is it?"

"Ah. No."

"Well," Edward said. And that's all he said for a while. They ate in silence as he watched customer after customer pay Emmett for food after noon.

"I'll be right back." Bella watched as Edward wandered off toward the back of the restaurant. She was surprised at his departure; he had shown little inclination to leave her side since he'd found her again.

A few moments later, Bella realized what he had gone to do—his music began flooding through the small restaurant. He had sniffed out the decrepit upright piano in the back as effectively as a lion tracking a gazelle.

When the music began, Emmett's eyebrows rose. "That's…new."

"Yes," Bella acknowledged. They listened to Edward play. The piano had clearly seen better days and was likely out of tune, but it didn't matter. Edward's skill made even this aged lady into a lovely siren whose song began calling to any travelers within range. People began peering into the window to see the source of the music wafting like a rich aroma into the outside world. The onlookers first became a trickle and then a flood into the small restaurant.

Idly, Bella explained to Emmett, "The treatment worked."

He swore. "Did it ever." Then, "Why don't you sound more enthusiastic?"

"I don't…I don't want to lose him."

"Yeah." The way he said it, Bella could see that Emmett understood.

Together, they watched the people drawn in by the gossamer threads of Edward's music. Only when the number of people began to overwhelm the other kitchen staff did Emmett pull himself to his feet.

"Remember what I said before, Bella. You ever need anything, I'm here." He towered over her, but she didn't feel intimidated. She felt protected.

Bella nodded her thanks.

The days that Edward played at _Joe's_, he drew such crowds of hungry commuters that he more than made up for the free meals he'd received.

* * *

In the afternoons, they walked down to the Fish Market so that Edward could play his music with Jasper. Bella formally met the man who had helped shepherd Edward through his transformation when she hadn't, who had bought him the new shoes, the new jacket. Who had encouraged Edward to play his music so that she might hear. She found out why Edward had called him "King." She found out that he called Edward "friend."

"I'm glad Edward found you," Jasper had said.

"And I'm glad Edward found _you_," she had responded.

"I don't deserve him," he said with some depthless sadness in his eyes.

"Neither do I."

Then they had smiled softly at each other and turned back to watching Edward play.

* * *

Friday loomed, an amorphous shadow. To dispel the dark, Bella sought out the sun. Their final afternoon of freedom, she asked Edward if they could forego the music and revisit Discovery Park instead. Edward had enthusiastically agreed.

He had long since quit his job at the park in favor of his music with Jasper, so they didn't have to check in at the groundskeeper shack when they arrived. As they stepped into the green, Bella could almost feel the city and its people melting away. Fields of tall grass waved in welcome, beckoning them onward.

Her feeling of ease was only tampered slightly when they reached the head of the path that would take them to the water. But she had descended the path once; she could do it again. Like before, Edward remained in her orbit as they descended, his body a bulwark of safety should her stumbling self require it.

She didn't.

Even though she wanted to reach out and steady herself numerous times, to feel him solid and warm and breathing under her hand, she didn't. She couldn't. She had learned her lesson from that night in his apartment. All week, Bella had not pushed, had not touched, had waited for him to make the first move. Although Edward had remained close, although his eyes sometimes flicked to her neck or her face or her hair, his hands never followed.

When they reached the sand, they took off their Chucks and set them neatly beside each other. Then they walked barefoot down the beach, pant legs rolled up. When a wave crashed in, Bella danced out of the way, inexplicably afraid of getting her feet wet. Not sharing her fear, Edward stood still as the water surged around his ankles, watching her mad dash to dry sand.

"Ha!" she exulted as the water fell short of her as its intended prey.

Although the water had receded, Bella was suddenly doused with spray anyway. She looked over to see Edward's wide smile. For once, his smile was anything but angelic. In fact, it looked downright devilish.

"Did you just get me wet?"

In response, Edward wound up to kick at the water again. Bella turned to flee. Running was never a good idea for her—much less on an uneven, sticking surface as this—but she was spurred on by the same adrenaline she'd felt as the sea had surged toward her, the idea that she was escaping some nameless fate.

For a moment, she thought she had broken free, had cleared the range of Edward's spray, had conquered fate. Then one of her feet sunk a little too forcefully into a trough in the sand, and she began to topple forward. She would have fallen had it not been for two strong hands on her waist. Those hands steadied her. Those hands were touching her. Those hands wouldn't let her fall.

Even after she was steady, even after she had not fallen, those hands didn't let her go. Those hands applied gentle pressure and spun her slowly to face their owner. Edward was touching her—the first time he'd touched her since that night in his apartment since he'd asked to play her.

Now, Edward's hands rested lightly on her waist, and one of his thumbs moved slightly, caressing the bare skin exposed by the bunched up hem of her shirt. She looked up at his face, expecting to see his eyes on hers. But he was looking down at his hand. He was looking down at her bare skin.

He swallowed, as if her nearness was unsettling, as if their connected skin caused him some nameless pain.

"Edward," she said, wanting desperately to ask him at last about that night, about their kiss, about his less than positive reaction.

He spoke before she could. "There's something I want to show you."

"Okay," she said slowly, wondering if she would like this something. His eyes seemed troubled, emotion crashing in them like the nearby waves. Now that they had re-established their physical connection, Edward seemed unwilling to break it, despite whatever torment gnawed at his soul. He wrapped an arm lightly, chastely over her shoulders, and they walked in the sand, forging twin footprints.

He led her down the beach, farther than they'd gone in the past, to the base of a bluff overlooking the water, the same bluff that he'd stood on so long ago, the setting sun at his back. The exposed wall of the bluff painted a picture of the land and its history in broad, uneven strokes of sand and silt and stone. As they drew closer, Bella saw that the natural forces of wind and water had not been the only ones to carve into the soft clay—here and there were fading indentations of marks left by human fingers. The messages ranged from loneliness to love to a need to be known after you're gone.

_Sandy_

_Jose and Estela_

_Mark was here_

Releasing her, Edward knelt and poked his own finger into a strip of unblemished clay on the far fringes of the more popular signature sites. She wondered what type of mark Edward would leave on this world. She wondered if he would write his name, their names in the bluff for all to see—at least until a stronger force triumphed. But he didn't write anything in the clay. Instead, he sat regarding his imprint for a moment.

"What are you going to show me?"

"What I'm going to show you," he said, "is a surprise."

Bella was reminded of him splashing her with saltwater. "You aren't going to wipe mud on my face, are you?"

"No, I have something much better that I can do with this mud."

She couldn't resist one last light-hearted jab. "You do know that mud pies aren't edible, right?"

He answered by rolling his eyes.

Now that she could, she thought she could probably tease Edward forever. Now that she could, she thought that she could look at him forever.

"Don't look," he said, staring her down in mock exasperation until she complied, turning her head to look out into the sea reaching for forever. But she couldn't resist trying to use her peripheral vision to figure out what mud surprise was in store.

Of course, Edward was too smart for that.

"No peeking," he chastised, darting a glance back to make sure she was following the rules. She was then, but her little smile told him that she hadn't been.

Edward scooped out two handfuls of the clay and began mashing it in his palms. He'd forgotten how much he loved working with clay.

When he was younger, when he had still gone to a real school, they had played with clay some days in art class. Clay days were his favorite; he liked making fat animals and skinny people and mixing colors to make a full rainbow. One day, the teacher had shown them how to make a flower—a beautiful red rose with a green stem and two leaves that Edward spent a long time shaping and reshaping until they were just right.

He spent a long time on this rose because this rose was special. This rose was for Rosalie. His sister had seemed increasingly sad as of late, as she had become what Mama called a teenager. She usually stayed in her room with the door closed and frowned all through dinner. So when class was over, Edward asked the teacher if he could take this special rose home to make Rose feel better. The teacher helped him mount it on a piece of cardboard and cover it with tin foil so that it would arrive home safely.

Now, Edward made a replica of that rose out of natural clay, carefully fashioning each petal, each leaf, a stem. When he was finished, he reached forward and laid the rose at Bella's feet. Rosalie hadn't liked the flower, but perhaps Bella would.

Bella looked down to see a rose nestled into the sand.

"It's beautiful," she said.

"Like you," Edward agreed.

They sat for hours and watched the wind running a gentle hand through the water, their clothes, their hair. They sat with their bodies mere inches from each other. And as they sat, they talked. Their conversation meandered through topics, most initiated by Edward. Bella had set out to study him, to discover this blossoming new Edward on the shores of Discovery Park. But this new Edward was just as delighted to discover her. For the first time, Edward was capable of doing so.

He asked her questions ranging from her past to her present to her future. All week, Bella had watched his lips wrap around increasingly complicated words, thoughts, emotions. Watching him learn to better express his increasingly complex thoughts was like watching him learn a foreign language. It was like watching him transform into the Edward that she had imagined him to be so long ago, when he had saved her life. When she had dreamed about calling him up on the phone and meeting with him for coffee.

"Am I getting smarter?" he asked suddenly.

At the question, Bella blinked. Then she started to laugh. She had just been picturing Edward lounging across from her in a coffee shop, debating the finer points of a literary classic splayed open in his lap.

"I think you already know the answer to that question."

He laughed, too, because he did. Then he sobered. "Will I be as smart as you?"

The question struck some chord in her, deep and dark.

"Edward, you're going to be so much smarter than me. So much that you won't even want me anymore."

They had always been from different worlds, separated by the barrier of their minds. For this brief moment, Edward had broken through that barrier, had joined her on her plane of existence. But he would not remain here for long; he would eventually break through a higher plane, one that might cause him to look down on her with pity. For so long, he had not been able to keep up with her; soon, she would not be able to keep up with him.

Reacting to the uncertainty in her eyes, Edward raised a finger to her cheek, replacing the minor chord in her soul with one of hope.

"I'll always want you, Bella."

Bella.

He'd just called her Bella.

His finger traced the name on her cheek, slowly, softly. She stayed very still, willing herself not to react, not to touch him in a way that would make him uncomfortable.

His fingers followed a vein in her neck.

She stayed very still.

His fingers travelled down her forearm, detouring briefly into the soft skin of her elbow, down her forearm, and circled her wrist.

She trembled with the effort of staying still.

His fingers entwined with hers. He helped her stand, but they left the rose in the sand, a fleeting symbol of their life, their love for another to find. Together, they walked back down the beach and up the path, Edward's warm, strong hand supporting her through even the slightest wobble. He would never let her fall. Together, they found their way home.

* * *

**Notes:** Gondolier, esteemed author of Hydraulic Level 5, recommended this story on **The Lazy Yet Discerning Ficster**. If you see no more updates from me, it's because I've died and gone to heaven. Also, thanks to your votes, AitIC snuck through to the second round of the **Indie Twific Awards**. Go team!


	18. In

**Note:** Infinite thanks to those of you who generously donated a few moments of your time to give me feedback and constructive criticism on previous chapters of the story. You are all as beautiful and as kind as this Edward. It's true. And I did end up dying and going to heaven; turns out, it's easier to write up there anyway. So pretty and soft.

Thanks to moonlightdreamer333, CapriciousC, WouldYouLookAtThat, and wickedcicada for their review of this chapter.

* * *

Their bus deposited them on a street corner roughly equidistant from their respective apartments. Each evening, Bella and Edward had stood on this corner and had talked and joked until it was time for them to part. But this evening, Bella didn't want to part. She didn't want to stop talking and joking.

On impulse, she asked, "Did you know that this is the street corner where we first met?"

Edward frowned and looked around. "It is?" Recognition did not spark in his eyes. Belatedly, Bella realized her error—the old Edward hadn't remembered that day. He hadn't remembered saving her life.

"Yes." At her wistful tone, Edward's eyes jerked to hers. He had done this often over the past few days, seemingly startled when he picked up on a nuance in her body language or tone. He had told her it was like suddenly seeing a new color in the spectrum.

"I don't…remember meeting you here," he said, trying to read this new color in her face.

"What do you remember?"

Edward looked past her, squinting as if peering into a murky memory. She'd asked him many questions about his past and always received the same foggy look while he tried to filter his recollections through his newfound understanding.

"I remember being in Dr. Jenks' office. I remember you being outside, in the hall. You gave me back my wallet." His eyes found hers again in silent eureka. "How did you have my wallet?"

Bella looked away, uncomfortable. "You dropped it here, on this street corner." Her eyes found the curb that had nearly ended her life, and she shivered once at the memory. Edward picked up that nuance as well but, like any normal person might, misinterpreted its cause.

"Here," he said, shrugging out of his coat and draping it over her shoulders. While her shiver had not been due entirely to the cold, she had been denying the night's chill in favor of spending time with Edward. The feel of his coat, with its lingering warmth and boy smell, was almost as good as getting an embrace from its owner. Almost.

As he stepped back, his hand grazed hers, and he drew air through his teeth. "Your skin is freezing!"

She was just about to tell him that her fingers were often cold—poor circulation—when he cupped her cold hands in his warm ones and drew them to his lips. The sensation of him breathing hot air on her skin wiped all thoughts from her mind as effectively as a warm rag removed words from a chalkboard.

Even after he had lowered their hands, he didn't unclasp their fingers, seemingly wanting to hold on to this night. She knew exactly how he felt. She didn't want to let go of his hands. She didn't want to let go of _him_.

So she didn't.

She grasped his fingers more tightly in hers and pulled and tugged until Edward, head cocked curiously, began to follow.

Bella led him to her apartment. For the first time since the morning after his birthday, Edward stepped through the doorway. He lingered on the four squares of linoleum that served as a foyer until she beckoned him forward.

"Welcome to Casa de Swan," she said with a laugh and proceeded to give him the less-than-grand tour. His eyes followed the flick of her hand toward the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom. As he looked down at the futon, she wondered if he remembered sitting on it, bloodied and broken. As she gestured toward her room, she wondered if he remembered huddling in her bed.

The visuals didn't seem to trigger any particular memory; when his eyes returned to hers, they were cautious, wary. He didn't seem to know what he was doing here. She wasn't sure that she knew either.

In an effort to make him more comfortable, she slipped off her shoes and indicated that he do the same. Looking down, she saw that despite her best efforts, she'd brought bits of Discovery Park home with her.

"I have sand between my toes." She wiggled them for emphasis.

Edward stepped very close to inspect her feet. Suddenly, he swung her up into his arms as if he were a groom carrying her across the threshold. He whirled them in a half-circle before stopping and regarding her seriously.

"We should take care of that," he said firmly, his shyness stifled by the thought of something hurting her. "Sand is an irritant. It will rub your skin away."

Bella laughed; his random leaps of logic continued to astound her. "And where, pray tell, did you learn this?"

"I do work in a library, you know." They smiled at their very own inside joke.

As Edward took them the few steps to the bathroom, Bella played with the hair at the nape of his neck. She wondered idly what he would look like with shorter hair. Then they were standing, frozen, in front of the medicine cabinet's mirror. This time, Bella didn't have to wonder if he remembered being in this particular room. She could almost see memory flooding into his face as his eyes roved over the toilet, the shower, and then back to hers in the mirror.

"Yes," she answered the question he had not asked. "You've been here before."

She expected him to say something, anything, that would confirm that he remembered being here with her the morning after his anything but happy birthday. But at first, he didn't say anything.

At least, not out loud.

Instead, his actions spoke for him. He confirmed that he remembered how she had helped him that night by lowering her to the toilet lid and arranging her limbs carefully so that she would be comfortable under his ministrations.

"Sand," he said, "has a tendency to get everywhere."

He said this as he carefully unbuttoned her jeans.

"So I'm afraid I'm going to have to check…" he tugged down her zipper one tooth at a time, "…everywhere."

Breathing suddenly became difficult.

Thinking suddenly became difficult.

Bella knew that she should probably say something, should probably remind him of what had happened the last time they had tried to be physically intimate, but her mind felt muddled, intoxicated by what he was saying, what he was doing, and what his eyes were expressing. Her own eyes felt as heavy-lidded as Edward's had been, watching her in the wee hours of that morning. Just as she had carefully helped him out of his pants, he helped her out of hers, his hands tugging her jeans over her hips, scraping down her buttocks, and over her knees.

His eyes never left her face. "Let's get that sand off you."

"Are you sure?" Bella whispered at last.

"I think I can handle a little sand," he said, but they both knew that this sand was a euphemism.

When she didn't respond, when she didn't force words past lips and tongue too dry for sound, Edward pulled his eyes from the gravity of her face at last and focused on the sand. Gently, he brushed each speck away, starting with the tips of her toes and moving up up up as Bella's eyelids went down down down.

Eyes closed, she blocked out all of the world except ten little fingers. Those fingers roved her ankles and calves and shins and knees—anywhere that insidious sand might have crept. Everywhere those fingers touched, they removed the sand but left a trail of pebbled flesh in their wake.

Too soon, the fingers were finished, the sand expunged, and Bella opened her eyes. Edward sat on the floor in front of her, his forehead resting on her knee, his face turned down, concealed.

"So soft," he said quietly as his palm lingered on her calf.

"Sand free," he said as his five fingers massaged her muscle.

Now that her skin was free of the sinister sand, Edward focused on her sinister skin. And skin, Bella suspected, was part of the problem. He shifted to rest his chin on her knee, exposing his face. His eyes were conflicted, and Bella knew at once that they had reached yet another barrier in his mind.

All day, he'd touched her out in the sun and on the sand and near the surf, and the touches had been life and innocence. But this touch, these five fingers gently squeezing her calf—this touch was not innocent. Edward's eyes were no longer innocent. They were uneasy and confused and tinged dark with a creeping fear.

"Are you okay?" Bella asked. Her voice was quiet, her body still. Before, Edward's fingers had each been a caress; now, they each were a carcass.

"I…" he said, but that was all he could say. His throat had closed up, the blackness in his eyes encroaching on his vision. He was looking at Bella sitting in front of him wearing his jacket, but he wasn't seeing Bella at all. Instead, he was seeing another girl with brown hair and brown eyes who had also sat in front of him wearing his jacket.

A girl who had started taking off his jacket.

_Wrong_. This was so wrong.

"Edward," Bella said, and now she was far away, standing over him from where he'd pushed back until his head pressed against the white towel hanging on the wall. The towel smelled like wet, dark fruit—like Bella. He breathed her in. He breathed in Bella.

This was Bella.

This was not some faceless girl in a club for men who were anything but gentlemen. It was Bella. Bella helped him stand. Bella led him from the bathroom, away from the sand, away from the skin.

Bella said, "I'm sorry."

They stood in the dark hallway.

"The jacket," Edward said. "Can you take it off?"

It was hot. Too hot.

_Wrong_.

Bella hesitated at his request, then said, "Of course."

She stepped into her bedroom and flipped on the light. Hunching away from him, she unzipped his jacket and slid it off. He could still see her face reflected in the dresser mirror.

And he was still hot.

For the first time in his life, he understood why. He understood what the heat meant. He understood what he had to do.

"Your shirt," he whispered. "Can you take it off, too?"

Bella stared at him in the mirror. He stared right back, noting the way that her eyes went all fuzzy and her cheeks dappled red and her inhale deepened. He sent her his own nuances back, eyes unblinking on hers, lips parting, hands clenching.

Her eyes never leaving his face, she did as he had asked.

And he was looking at her, but for an instant, all he could see was a different girl, in a different house, standing in front of a different mirror. He was thinking about a time when he'd still been living in the little white house with his Mama and his sister. He was thinking about a time when he had been standing in front of a closed door, a clay rose in his hand.

When he had gotten home that day from school, his special rose for Rosalie was only a little smooshed from where he'd accidentally sat on it while getting into the car. Nevertheless, he had arranged the rose carefully in his hands and went to stand in front of Rosalie's perpetually closed door.

Only, the door wasn't closed.

He was raising his hand to knock when he saw that the door was a little bit open. Through the crack, he could see Rosalie. She was standing with her back to him, but he could see her face in the mirror.

Just like he could now see Bella's face in the mirror.

Young Edward had smiled when he thought about what Rosalie's face would look like when he gave her the beautiful rose. He had stopped smiling when he realized that he could see more than just her face.

He had stood and stared at Rosalie in the mirror. He'd never seen her girl parts before, squeezed so tightly into something small and red and shiny.

He began to feel hot, his skin crawling with an army of ants.

It was not nice to look at girls. His Mama had said so. He was about to turn away, to let her be alone, when she raised her hands and began pushing her girl parts around like they were clay. There was no way he could ignore them then. He wondered if they felt like clay.

He was too hot.

"Rosalie," he said, and his voice cracked like it had started to do sometimes.

She didn't hear him. His voice was too soft; he was too overwhelmed with something dark and hot and dangerous. His skin swarmed with fire ants.

"Rosalie," he repeated, louder this time.

This time, she heard him. Her big blue eyes grew wide in the mirror, and she whirled, pulling up a discarded shirt to cover herself. Then she began screeching words that he had never heard come from her beautiful mouth.

"You filthy little pervert! How _dare_ you stand there and watch me getting dressed like some filthy, no-good, peeping Tom."

In his fright, Edward dropped the clay rose.

Rosalie kept screaming, striding forward and throwing her door open fully, yelling down the hall for their Mama. Edward staggered back, all knobby knees and elbows, trying to tell her that it had been an accident, that he hadn't meant to see her girl parts, that he had brought her a present he hoped would make her feel better. But Rosalie was louder than he was. She wasn't listening to him.

Mama came hurrying up at last, and Edward tried to tell her what had happened. He pointed to the rose on the floor, trying to explain, but it was too late. Mama was stepping on it. Mama wasn't looking at it. But she wasn't looking at his face, either. She wasn't watching to see what he was going to say. She was looking somewhere else, somewhere down.

"Rosalie," she said in a quiet, scary voice, her eyes never leaving Edward. "Go back to your room."

"But Mom—"

"Now!"

Rosalie's door slammed in her wake.

Mama was silent for a moment.

"Edward," she said into the stillness, "this is wrong."

She sounded angry. He didn't think she was talking about his rose.

"I was just—"

"No!" Mama said, and her voice was no longer quiet.

"This," she said, pointing down to his pants, "is wrong. Do you understand me?"

He didn't understand.

She tried to make him understand. She tried to make him understand with her voice. "Wrong!" she screamed. She tried to make him understand with her hands. She tried to make him understand with her feet.

"Dirty!" she screamed.

"Wrong!" she screamed.

He grabbed himself, cringing back from her flying fists and shins. For some reason, his movement seemed to enrage Mama further.

"No!" she had screamed. "Don't do that!"

She'd snatched his arm away, crushing his knuckles in hers. She'd slapped the tears right into his eyes. "Wrong!" she said. _Wrong_, said her hands and her feet and her face.

Mama had stared down at his crushed rose, now no more than clay smeared into the carpet, and had snapped, "Clean that up. Now!" And her voice, it said that the rose, this rose that he had lovingly fashioned and shaped to bring a smile to his sister's face, that rose was nothing. It was dirt. It was trash.

And the tears had flowed from his eyes and mingled with his snot and his spit. He was crying and cringing away from this person who looked like his Mama but who wasn't acting like his Mama.

And then Edward himself was crying.

Edward was standing in front of the girl he loved more than anything in this world, who was willing to give herself to him, who was willing to do anything he asked, and he was crying.

He was crying for the little boy who knew not what he did that day, on that day and on so many other days. He was crying for the little boy whose Mama had forbidden him from playing the music because she couldn't stand the constant reminder that her child would never grow up. Whose Mama had beaten him for having an inadvertent erection. Whose Mama had abandoned him because she couldn't bear the social stigma of having a mentally deficient child.

All his life, he'd lived as if asleep, barely conscious of the people around him. He was awake now, awake to find himself surrounded by an infinite cold. He'd been standing alone, smiling, a dark blip lost in an endless tundra.

He was awake and he was crying and Bella didn't know why. Like Rosalie, Bella cried out. Like Rosalie, she whirled. Like Rosalie, she frantically tried to cover herself with her shirt.

"I'm sorry," she was saying. "I'm so, so sorry." And her face and her voice and her eyes, they all meant it.

She was _nothing_ like Rosalie. Rosalie was hard where Bella was soft, was cold where Bella was warm, was hate where Bella was love.

"No," Edward said through his tears. "You don't need to be s-sorry. It's not your f-fault." Emotion made him stammer, made his words soft and garbled. He sounded like Young Edward, trying frantically to explain to his Mama that he'd merely wanted to give his sister a rose. He sounded foolish. He sounded stupid.

Bella thrust the shirt over her head, but before she could cover herself, Edward took two steps forward and held her hands. They were cold, just like he had remembered. Instinctively, he began to warm them with his own.

"No," he said.

"Please," he said.

"I need you to show me," he said.

"I don't understand," she said, her eyes worried and afraid and oh-so tender.

He needed to make her understand.

He knew what she must be thinking. The day he'd found her again, the day that the music had brought her to him, he had tried to show her just how much she meant to him, how she was the one who inspired him to play the music. He'd played the music for her, and then he played music _on_ her. It was the only way he could tell her, the only way he was capable of showing her how much he cared. No—how much he loved.

But then he'd asked her to play him. He'd asked for more more more, and he knew that it was wrong. He had been too hot already, so hot that he would have burned her. He shouldn't have wanted more of her, more than she was willing to give. He shouldn't have asked more of her than he was able to take.

He hadn't understood then.

But he understood now.

"Play me," he said, and slipped the shirt back over her head, dropping it to become a puddle on the floor.

"But—"

"Please." The merest of whispers held the mightiest of meanings.

Before, Edward hadn't understood what he was asking. But he understood now. He understood what he needed her to do. She wasn't sure—he could see it in her eyes—but she was sure of one thing. Unlike the Edward he'd been back that first evening in his apartment, this Edward knew what he was asking.

He knew, but he was still nervous. And he was trembling and he was frightened and she was oh-so gentle. She tried to soothe his trembling flesh against her palm.

"I would never hurt you," she said, and Edward believed her. He trusted Bella more than anyone else in the world. She had never hurt him.

And she didn't now. She was slow. She was gentle. She gave him pleasure instead of pain. She showed him that his pleasure wasn't wrong—it was very, very right. She showed him that she loved him. And then, when she had shown him everything that she could show, he showed her right back.

Later, when night had coalesced around the sleepy Seattle skyline, Bella fairly floated into the kitchen for a drink of water, swathed in sheets that trailed behind her like the train of a formal gown. She didn't see her cabinets, her cardboard table, the scuffed floor. The white walls became a perfect canvas on which she could see her future—a future that included Edward.

On those walls, her imagination projected single frames, potential Polaroids—Edward joining her in the halls of her school, a small wedding in the sand, maybe even children with her eyes and his smile. When she had been with Jacob, she had never thought about these things. She had never thought beyond her next graduation. With Jacob, it was always about the past, them growing up together, their friendship. With Edward, it was all about the future, them growing old together, their forever.

With a faraway, forever smile, Bella finished sipping her water and poured the rest idly down the sink, watching as it swirled and disappeared. She was gathering up the train of her makeshift robe when she caught a neon blue flash in her periphery. Looking over, she saw her cell phone winking at her from the coffee table. It was probably just Charlie; they usually talked on Thursday nights.

But the call was not from Charlie.

It was from J. Jenks. The name hit her like a brick, forcing the air from her lungs. As she stared down, the name kept flashing at her, a probing finger trying to pop the little bubble that she'd been ensconced in with Edward.

She knew that she should probably just go back to bed, to sleep, to Edward. But she knew that she wouldn't be able to sleep without knowing if she'd been found out, if Dr. Jenks had somehow been notified about Edward's transformation. She needed to know what type of reception she could expect on the morrow.

With a shaky breath, she flipped the cell phone open and pressed the button for voice mail.

"Bella," Dr. Jenks' voice began, and his voice immediately put her on edge. It didn't sound neutral. It didn't sound elated. It didn't sound furious.

It sounded afraid.

The fear in his voice reached out and coated Bella's stomach as completely and relentlessly as encroaching moss.

Dr. Jenks continued, "I need you to come into the lab ASAP."

He continued, "It's Alice."

He continued, "There's been a complication."

And he continued about some team meeting Friday morning and how she needed to be there earlier than usual, but Bella could hardly listen.

Instead, she was stuck on one word.

_Complication_.

Alice.

There was something wrong with Alice.

And if there was something wrong with Alice…

.

.

.

.

.

The phone fell from her hand and shattered when it hit the floor.


	19. The

An eternal child sat cross-legged on her bed, her face upturned to the meager light of the single, barred window above her head, higher than she could reach—although she had certainly tried.

As she watched, dark clouds rolled in off the Puget Sound, flooding toward Seattle like a tidal wave of the heavens. Thunderstorms rarely occurred in the Pacific Northwest due to the calming, moderating influence of the nearby ocean. But on this night, the nearby body of water was not strong enough to temper Mother Nature.

She had known the storm was coming, of course. She had seen the signs better than anyone; she gazed into her postcard of sky for almost as many hours as her computer monitor. Just as she had been the first to foretell Edward's metamorphosis, she was also the first to notice something wicked this way coming. The North wind artfully brushed away the lighter, puffier clouds as if clearing its canvas of detritus in preparation for the true masterpiece.

And what a masterpiece this was. The demon winds danced through the darkened sky, dipping to stir the seas and sway the trees and shake Seattle like a snow globe, hats and hair and trash rising to the air under the onslaught. For most of the night, Alice had listened to the beast rage against the confines of physics, had watched its neon tendrils whip and crack ineffectually at the earth.

Alice knew exactly how it felt.

She knew exactly what it was like to be restrained by forces greater than her own, unable to reach out and touch what she desired most. The wind wanted to be felt, to be heard, to be known. Alice wanted similar things—she wanted to be known. She wanted to feel.

She had been restrained her entire life, at first because her mind was deficient and now because it was overly efficient. Now, she had so very much to offer; she had the mental capacity to solve many of humanity's problems, but they were wasting her. They were treating her like a child. They should not have been able to restrain her; there was no comparable force greater than her mind. Unfortunately, the small, weak vessel in which her mind found itself was a liability. Her body had never been able to get far, had never been able to make it past the chain link fence before she was caught, forcibly restrained by bodies larger and stronger than her own.

At first, she'd asked nicely to be let out of the compound.

"I would like to talk to new people," she had said.

"We'll bring new people for you to talk to," they had responded. And they did. But Alice quickly found that everyone who spoke with her was too slow, too stupid. She would find her attention wandering while she waited for them to finish what she had already intuited they were going to say.

Eventually, she started to decline conversations entirely because they were too predictable. She needed fresh meat, someone whom she could really sink her teeth into—she needed Edward. Like her, Edward would be fast. Edward would be able to keep up. Ultimately, Edward would surpass her.

Thus, Edward was the only one who could fix what was wrong with her.

She knew this as surely as she had known that the weather was changing. She knew this because—despite how much the rational Alice had fought it—she had been forced to accept Mary as an oracle after all.

At first, Alice had dismissed Mary's visions as nothing but a candle flicker of insanity. She refused to believe the watercolor vistas in her brain that informed her she would get no farther than the fence should she try to escape the compound.

But then she had tried to escape.

She had gotten no farther than the fence. She had only half-climbed it when the strong arms were around her waist. She kept climbing, but the arms were unyielding. The arms were joined by more arms until her fingers were ripped from the chain links, the metal lines forever etched into her skin. When those arms deposited her back in her room, Alice didn't try to escape again. Instead, Alice embraced Mary for the first time in her life, embraced her fully and wholeheartedly. She was no longer Alice and no longer Mary but was Mary Alice.

Mary Alice sat and watched visions of Edward dance in her head, visions that she had previously believed were nothing more than idle fantasies. Now that these fantasies had proved to be potential realities, Mary Alice was riveted. She had thought that watching Edward on a computer monitor was interesting. Watching him in living color was divine.

She watched Edward play his music, music that Mary had known he would play from the first moment she had seen his fingers twitch against his thigh. She watched and then she lamented because, while she could see his music, could see the concentration on his face and the flowing movement of his limbs and the euphoria in every line of his body, she could not hear it.

Mary had never been able to hear.

Then, of course, she had seen Bella. For a long while, Mary Alice had to stop watching. She couldn't bear it. She couldn't bear to see Bella smiling up at Edward from where Alice should have been and touching Edward where Alice should have touched.

But if she couldn't watch Bella, then she couldn't watch Edward. She couldn't watch Edward's future and make sure that nothing bad was going to happen to him. The dilemma corroded her insides and clawed at her heart until she started watching again.

She was glad she had.

For she saw that something bad _was _going to happen.

She wasn't worried, though. At the same time that she saw this something bad, she also saw a simple way to turn it into something good—a simple way to forever negate the Bella variable. Or, rather, to ensure that someone else did it for her. Not everyone was as enamored with Edward as she and Bella.

Mary Alice sat listening to the storm's gleeful cackle and waited for that someone else to make his move.

* * *

Edward awoke to cacophony.

Despite the night's catharsis, despite Bella's soothing presence, he hadn't slept well. Noise had infiltrated his slumber, seeping through the thin apartment walls like dark ink into water. At first, the sound seemed nothing more than distant grumbles of thunder in the night. From the occasional flashbulb against his eyelids, Edward guessed that it was, indeed, storming in the early morning. But as he slowly came awake, he realized that the sound drowning out even the thunder was actually two people talking loudly nearby.

A neighboring couple was having a conversation, and, although their voices were weak and distorted through the plaster, Edward could tell that their topic was less than pleasant.

_I hate you_, the wife said, punctuating the sentiment with a slew of dirty words. She was bending over a hissing frying pan, cooking eggs for her husband, who had stumbled in late the night before smelling less of work and more of play.

Edward frowned and burrowed deeper into his pillow, hoping to dampen this dissonance, to recapture the serenity of sleep.

_I wish you were dead_, her husband shot back, looking with loathing at his wife's unshapely figure and bed hair.

At that, Edward's eyes flew open in shock. How could a couple who had once thought the world of each other use their words to inflict such damage now? He would never, ever talk to Bella like that. A world without Bella was not a world worth living in. She was his life now.

Edward stirred and reached out, seeking Bella's warmth and life. But his hand slid across cool linen, and he rolled to see the bed beside him bare with only the merest rumple in the sheets to indicate where she had lain.

He certainly hoped that her absence was not due to last night. He hoped he hadn't done something wrong. He hoped he hadn't hurt her. Perhaps the noise had awoken her as well; it had definitely escalated into an all-out riot. The neighbor man and his wife were not even bothering to let the other finish now before starting in on the next segment of their diatribe—angry sentiments that fit together and overlapped like cogs on a wheel.

The noise ground and grated at him, so Edward went in search of solace. He didn't have to walk far; Bella was curled on the futon, a sheet draped haphazardly over her body. He wondered if her being out here had anything to do with her tight expression as she had come back to bed last night. But then he was distracted from further musing by the sheet and the skin that it both hid and exposed. As it always had when he looked at Bella, the rest of the world dropped away—the noise receded—and he stood for a long moment, basking in her silence, her beauty, just _Bella_.

Then he carefully lowered himself down on the cushions, fitting his limbs to hers and arranging the sheet to cover them both. Bella stirred but subsided; she did not wake. Well then, he would have to make her. Last night, Bella had taken him just as he was, bruised and broken, and had made him whole.

He very much wanted an encore.

So he began warming up his hands in preparation, flexing his fingers until they responded delicately and precisely. Then he began playing a melody on any skin that was in reach. On her skin, the skin that had so tempted and tortured him, he played the very best parts of her lullaby, the happy parts that swelled as big as his heart when he had seen her again.

He was playing Bella's lullaby—on Bella.

The music started softly, thrumming behind her knee, up the back of her thigh. When the music dipped into the lower octaves, his fingers dipped into the small of her back. When the music soared, his fingers flew up her spine. Bella's skin seemed almost to quiver, her eyelids fluttering. He was getting close to the climax. Then, as he began to play a swelling riff up her shoulder, she stirred.

The sheet slipped.

And Edward stared.

His fingers hung, suspended, in the perfect unresolved note, tight and anxious. Bella sighed and shifted again, drawing the sheet back over her lady parts.

The lullaby continued, flowing into a glissando up her neck and behind her ear. As he reached her face, Bella opened her eyes at last. For a moment, everything was right with the world. But in another moment, as another blink chased the sleep from her eyes, Edward could see there was something wrong.

Bella's lullaby cut short.

* * *

Something was wrong with Alice.

That amorphous something had delayed Bella's sleep, had made her dreams restless, and had shot into the forefront of her mind even as she awoke to the blessed feel of Edward's fingers.

Something was wrong with Alice, but all Edward knew was that there was something wrong. Bella felt his eyes on her as they prepared themselves for the day, felt his glances like a light mist of rain as they waited at the bus stop. She was overly aware of his thigh, warm and hard against her own on the bus seat.

A bus had brought them together. A bus had transported her into his life. And now, a bus might very well be transporting him out of hers. This time on this bus, his attention was not elsewhere, his head was not turned away, face pressed into the breeze. This time, his attention was fully on her.

"What's wrong?" he had asked after she'd come back to bed last night, worried by the sound of her phone shattering on the floor and the sight of her moon-pale face.

"What's wrong?" he'd asked again this morning when he'd warmed her awake.

Both times, she'd answered, "Nothing," and had not met his eyes because it was a lie—a lie that she desperately wanted to be true. Last night, as Edward helped tuck her back into bed after she'd gotten her drink and Dr. Jenks' message, Bella had told herself that the complication could be any number of things. Alice could have had a hissy fit. Alice could have fallen down and hit her head. Alice could have run away.

But the storm that had crept upon them in the night made it difficult for Bella to accept any of these simple conclusions. Some people could feel in their bones when inclement weather was coming. She could feel in her bones that this storm was more than a storm; it seemed almost symbolic of something as yet unknown and unseen.

The winds had buffeted them as they had left the haven of her apartment, pressing them together for stability and warmth. On their journey, Edward continued touching her in small ways, his eyes concerned. She'd told him that nothing was wrong, but he was now smart enough to know better. He pressed against her on the bus seat, a hand writing her name on her knee.

* * *

Something was wrong with Alice.

Bella could see it in the faces of the few lab technicians they passed. She could feel it in the starkness of their expressions. She could hear it in the words they didn't say even as they did murmur a curt greeting.

Dr. Jenks wasn't in his office.

The clock on the wall ticked down the time until he would arrive and they would find out what, exactly, was wrong. Bella and Edward sat facing the empty leather chair behind the expansive desk. Edward sat with his knees pulled up to his chest, curled languorously into the seat like a cat, his body angled toward hers, just as it had been all morning. Just as it had been since the moment she'd met him.

"Bella, Edward," Dr. Jenks acknowledged brusquely, brushing past them to sit behind his desk. Seeing his somber face, Bella went even more still. The doctor looked like he hadn't eaten, hadn't slept, hadn't smiled in quite some time.

He sat gingerly in his chair and regarded them for a moment.

"Edward, why don't you go talk to Alice?" he said. "She's been asking about you. We'll get to your check-up a little later."

Bella's heart seemed to still.

Alice was here.

Alice hadn't run away.

Edward frowned and looked to Bella. She nodded, trying to smile encouragingly. He wasn't fooled, but he also read what she needed him to in her eyes, like she knew he would.

"Alright," he said to Dr. Jenks, standing and moving to the door with only one last glance at Bella.

"Ask Jane to escort you," the doctor shot after him, and Edward nodded before closing the door behind him.

Bella had waited this long, but she couldn't wait any longer.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

* * *

Something was wrong with Alice.

Edward could hear it in the whispers all around him, snatches of conversation between lab techies. Alice was at the forefront of everyone's mind. Even Jane was thinking about hurrying him along so she could get back to the task of analyzing Alice's latest blood work.

He wondered if Bella had known. He wondered if Alice was the reason that Bella had been avoiding looking him in the eye all morning. If Alice was the reason why Bella had looked so afraid.

When Edward stepped through the door of the room to which Jane escorted him, a young woman looked up from where she was sitting in a rocking chair. He blinked at her for a moment, searching her face for the withdrawn little girl who had consistently beaten him at their video game.

He couldn't find her.

The woman sitting primly before him was unnaturally calm and poised. Yet her eyes shone from her face with an eerie excitement. From what he had heard as he walked, there was something very wrong with this Alice.

And she knew it.

Yet she seemed to be relishing the storm, seemed almost to have known that he would walk in the door at that very moment, seemed to be bursting with enthusiasm to speak to him. Her emotion was an anachronism—like laughter at a funeral.

_Hi Edward_, she said, lips parting in what was supposed to be a smile but what seemed more like a snarl. Overhead, the sky rumbled, as if to punctuate that she had timed her statement perfectly.

"Hi," he said.

An uneasy quiet ensued.

Then Edward realized that she hadn't actually greeted him aloud.

* * *

"Alice is regressing," Dr. Jenks said, sitting back heavily in his chair and running a hand over his face.

Of all Bella's theories, this was not one of them. She'd hoped for him to say, "Alice's emotional state is not maturing as we'd hoped." Or, "Alice had some type of small accident, but she's fine now." Instead, all signs pointed to the fact that she was losing her formidable intelligence, that she was beginning to slowly regress back down the bell curve up which her intellect had skyrocketed.

Regressing.

Dr. Jenks kept talking, telling Bella that Alice had been forgetting things, little things. But these little things were starting to add up, becoming bigger things, things that they could no longer ignore.

The treatment had worked.

But it wasn't continuing to work.

* * *

Edward's eyes widened, and Alice's grimace-smile widened accordingly as she watched understanding blossom on his face.

"We don't have much time," she said, "so don't talk. Just listen. It will be faster this way."

Edward could only nod.

She said, "Hi Edward."

"Hi Alice," she responded for him.

Alice spewed rapid-fire pleasantries about how he'd been and how she'd been and my, wasn't this interesting weather they were having? Edward gaped at her, eventually understanding what she was doing. Alice was having a conversation with him—by herself.

"Things are about to get messy," she continued.

"Messy how?" she asked herself.

Alice had just asked herself the very question that Edward might have asked, had she let him.

"The treatment worked," she continued, "but it's not permanent. I'm regressing. I'm forgetting things. This morning, I couldn't remember the password for my computer. Granted, it's fifty-three characters long, and I change it every six hours, so I thought that maybe I just have a glitch, a momentary lapse of concentration. But I don't."

* * *

Dr. Jenks said, "We're working overtime to figure out what went wrong and what we can do to fix it."

"What if you can't fix it?" Bella asked, feeling like she wasn't here, feeling like she wasn't really having this conversation. She couldn't possibly be having this conversation. She was a thousand miles away, somewhere soft and sunny and safe—with Edward. She had only ever wanted to be with Edward.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw up.

Instead, she sat very still and waited for Dr. Jenks to tell her that everything was going to be okay. She sat and waited for Dr. Jenks to tell her that he and his team were well on their way to creating a miraculous cure to fix whatever had gone wrong with their miraculous treatment.

"If we can't fix it," Dr. Jenks said, "we don't know what's going to happen."

But the fear in his eyes indicated that they did.

* * *

"We're going to die." Alice's voice was as placid as if she were detailing the steps to solve a differential equation.

"Do you understand?" she demanded, and she was speaking to him this time.

"Yes," Edward answered, his eyes wide, his head reeling. He was starting to see where she was going with this. He was starting to pull it out of her mind, just like he'd pulled the thoughts of Bella's neighbors out of theirs.

The conversations in the hallway had not been conversations at all. The shouting he'd heard this morning had not been shouting. He was "hearing" Alice's thoughts the moment that she thought them.

And what he was hearing in her thoughts was that Alice could see the future. Alice could see his words before he spoke them. Alice could see his actions before he made them. In her mind, she watched him collapse to sit on the edge of her bed a few seconds before he actually did.

The treatment they had both received had been a small stone thrown into a pond, its ripples only now starting to manifest. Dr. Jenks had thought that he was going to make them smart. He'd actually made them a good deal more than smart. He'd made them something more than human.

Their past and their present and their future began to overlap and merge and tangle together into a rat's nest of sight and sound that Edward could hardly decipher. Being with Bella was calm, peaceful. Being with Alice was like being in the epicenter of the maelstrom waging above their heads. He focused on the words Alice was saying and tried to block out the thoughts that he was hearing and the visions that she was seeing.

"The treatment worked," she was saying, "but it has a glitch. It's not going to be permanent unless you and I can find a way to fix it. I've spent every waking hour of every day looking for a cure, looking for a solution to this glitch in our brains, a glitch that will eventually kill us."

"We're going to die?" she asked in her Edward voice, which was the deepest, most serious version of her own.

"Yes," she answered. "Unless you do exactly as I tell you."

* * *

Dr. Jenks swiveled his chair just in time to see lightning lick toward the water out his window. "The team is working overtime to figure out what we can do to fix this." He paused to watch whitecaps surging toward the shore. "I never thought I'd say this, but I'm so very grateful that Edward didn't respond to the treatment."

For a long moment, Bella couldn't say anything, anything at all. Dr. Jenks looked as frail as withered leaves, like a single breath might crumble him and send him spinning off into the storm. At long last, Bella drew in that single breath.

"There's something I have to tell you."

* * *

"Can you do exactly as I tell you?" Alice demanded, her eyes glowing with an intensity that could almost pass for insanity.

Edward was still reeling, his mind assaulted by the visions swarming out of Alice like killer bees. It was all too much, too soon, too fast.

"I can," Alice answered for him, his eventual answer. She knew because she'd _seen_ it.

"Edward, you're going to be very smart very soon. I need you to continue my research, the research I've been working on ever since I realized that the treatment would not be permanent. Ever since I realized that Mary was an oracle after all. I've gotten us this far, but you'll need to get us the rest of the way."

"Can you do that?" Alice demanded.

Edward said, "I don't…know if I will ever be as smart as you."

"You're going to be every bit as smart as I, if not more. You have an advantage I don't."

And with that, Alice shoved him forcefully into the future. Edward saw himself dressed in a white lab coat like Dr. Jenks, surrounded by the top intellectual minds in the world. He was working closely with them, pulling the bits of data that he needed directly out of their heads as easily as plucking grapes from their stem. He watched himself feed the needed tidbits of information into his supercomputer brain.

Alice showed him being successful. Alice showed them standing side-by-side, smiling and cured, introduced to the world amid the visual applause of camera flashes. But Alice didn't show him Bella.

"Promise me one thing," Alice said. "Promise me that you won't be reckless. Promise me that when you see a man who wants to hurt you, you will run as fast as you can. Can you do that, Edward? Can you run?"

In Alice's mind, Edward saw another scene, this one so very different from the one with him in a white lab coat. That vision had been crystal clear and triumphant and detailed. Alice now showed him images that flashed quickly in darkness, almost before he could comprehend them. He saw red hair that curled and bounced like fire; the indistinct shape of a man holding something shiny in his fist, something that glittered and sparkled in the sunlight; himself running, as fast as he could, faster even than when he ran up the path in Discovery Park.

Alice was concentrating very hard. She showed him running, again and again.

"I can run," Edward whispered. He would run. He would stay safe. He would stay safe for Bella. He would run as far and as fast as he had to, so that he could be in her arms again.

Alice stared into his eyes and liked what she saw—him running, fast and far.

"Okay," she said. "They're coming. Remember your promise, Edward. I'm counting on you. I can't do this without you." Her voice was sad. She continued rocking herself, staring out the room's sole window, her mind as dark as the sky outside.

"They're coming now," she said, and he could hear them. "It will be easier if you go quietly."

* * *

Dr. Jenks looked at Bella expectantly, waiting for whatever it was that she had to tell him. Waiting to hear the news that would bring his already crumbling castle in the sky crashing down around his ears.

"The treatment worked," she whispered.

The doctor stared.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Edward's treatment worked."

The doctor blanched as if stabbed.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner. I just found out this week. Edward is…"

She looked down at her feet, unable to finish. But she didn't have to.

Dr. Jenks and his technicians flew to Alice's cell, where they found Edward and Alice sitting calmly, both staring out her window. Alice didn't even look at the orderlies as they escorted Edward to the lab. Edward didn't either. He went quietly, even though he understood that they were about to poke and prod him to see if he shared Alice's glitch. Only when they tried to separate him from Bella, when they tried to lead him off to his own room so he could have some privacy, was he no longer quiet.

"I don't want privacy," Edward insisted. "I want Bella."

Gone was the Edward who obligingly obeyed others' every whim, who had taken a needle with the ease of an unsuspecting toddler. In his place was an Edward whose jaw was set in clear determination to get exactly what he wanted. And this Edward wanted Bella.

So Bella he got. Bella sat with him as they took his blood pressure and his blood. She watched as they put him through his paces, asked him increasingly tough questions, and showed him a series of oversized flashcards with ink blots. Through it all, Edward's eyes remained steadfastly on her face, aside from flickering glances necessary to pronounce that an ink blot looked like a clay rose in sand or a smattering of freckles on a nose or the visual pattern of joy. His gaze never wavered, and neither did the soft smile curling his lips and warming his eyes to a burnished green. He seemed to be trying to tell Bella something, to reassure her that everything would be okay.

Bella didn't understand his optimism, and she most assuredly did not share it. Her fear for Edward's safety had become so large, so tangible, that it threatened to consume her. She could almost feel Edward being sucked away from her by the inevitability of fate. She had feared him being swarmed by exultant scientists and researchers and music fanatics and—eventually—fanatics in general as the world slowly sat up and took notice of this incredible, talented, humble, and caring man. She had feared that his newfound intelligence and resulting fame and fortune would warp the gentle soul who had read to her from a child's book. Who had so carefully and softly snuck under her skin and into her soul.

She had feared this scenario—but the current reality was far, far worse than anything she could have imagined. She had feared fame and fortune, but what she should have feared—what she could not even have known that she should have feared—was the unrelenting, ice-cold hand of fate. Edward and Alice had eaten of the forbidden fruit, had eaten from the tree of knowledge—like Adam and his Eve, their curse may very well be death.

When the last test was complete and the final measurement taken, Bella didn't even have to ask Dr. Jenks for the results. She could see Edward's prognosis in the doctor's cooling ember eyes. She could see that Edward knew it, too, as he squinted at the carefully cultivated façade that Dr. Jenks had spent decades perfecting. Yet even the doctor's mask could not quite hide his devastation.

Whatever Edward saw in that face, whatever he read through that mask, it somehow did not devastate him. He merely nodded once and rose to his feet, gently extricating himself from the white coats who continued to circle him like carrion birds.

"Time for us to be going, then," he said to Bella.

"Edward, I don't think that's wise," Dr. Jenks interjected. "It would be best if you stayed for observation over the next several weeks."

"Not yet," Edward said, his tone soft yet steel. "There is something I need to do."

Looking back at Bella, Edward inclined his head for her to follow. She did, and no one stopped them. She followed him through a maze of corridors, which he navigated flawlessly despite the noted lack of Jane. She followed him past a receptionist who stared and startled toward her phone, red manicured nails grasping at air. She followed him through the whooshing glass doors and past a row of freshly dug mounds of earth lining the chain-link fence. Some part of Bella's mind—a part that was somehow still capable of thinking and observing and categorizing—realized that the mounds were graves. Too small to be human graves, they were the graves of the monkeys and dogs and mice that had once brought a darkened, sterile lab to life.

Someone had laid a ragged bouquet of wildflowers on the littlest grave.

They breached the fence, strode past the security guard, and walked out of the compound the same way that they had arrived—together and free.

And then they merely walked.


	20. Infinite

They walked away, far away from complications and needles and white. They walked past shops they'd never entered and people they'd never met and streets they'd never seen. They walked until Bella could walk no more, until her knees buckled and only Edward broke her fall.

He helped negotiate her traitorous limbs to the nearest bench, a bus stop sheltered by a hutch with an impromptu coating of graffiti. Unlike on the bluff at Discovery Park, the marking of a person's passing in this manner didn't seem quite as endearing.

They sat and didn't speak. They sat and watched life happen. They sat and watched mothers with their children and couples holding hands and grandparents out for a stroll. Buses came and went, but they didn't get on any of them.

Edward was silent, giving Bella time to digest what had happened, what she had heard. She sat frozen and numb, her eyes never leaving her feet, never acknowledging his face. Time passed, and they were eventually alone, left behind. In the stillness, in the crushing silence, Edward began to speak at last.

"Bella," he said, "there are so many things I've been thinking. So many things I've wanted to tell you."

And Bella stared straight ahead and began to shake her head, softly at first, then harder and harder as though trying to expel his words from her mind.

"No, Edward. Please don't do this."

"I need to do this," he said sadly. This was exactly what he'd meant when he'd told Dr. Jenks that he had things to do.

"No." Her words became choppy. "You can't say things like that. Don't speak to me as if you're saying goodbye. Dr. Jenks is going to fix this. He's going to find a way to stop the regression."

And Edward smiled slightly and began to speak. Before, words had been elusive puffs of air, difficult for his mind to grab, difficult for him to shape even once they were on his lips. But now, when he really needed them to, the words just started coming. They started coming, and they didn't stop.

"I've always wanted to tell you how beautiful you are when you smile at me. I've always wanted to tell you how alive I feel seeing you in the sun with the wind through your hair.

"I want you to know that I don't regret taking the treatment. I don't regret taking it a second time, either. Not for a moment. Because the treatment is what has allowed me to understand how beautiful you truly are. Not only on the surface, but where it really matters—behind those beautiful eyes of yours."

Bella couldn't bear it; she turned her head away, unwilling to have him look into her eyes, into her soul.

But he didn't stop talking. "You're the type of person who would offer your hand to a stranger merely to bring a mentally challenged boy joy. Who would willingly suffer through three days of pain and sweat and tears with someone you barely knew. The type of person who would willingly give of herself to someone like me, expecting nothing in return."

And Bella could only shake her head because the way that Edward saw her was not even close to the way that she saw herself.

"My only regret is that I don't remember the first time I laid eyes on you, the first moment that you came into my life. What did I say to you?" Edward looked lost and wistful, frowning intently into the dark abyss of his memory, searching for Bella's face. He felt as if he had always been searching for her face.

"You didn't say anything at all," Bella whispered. "You saved my life that day. That day, and every day since."

They were silent for a long while as another bus wheezed to a stop, passengers disembarking and wandering off, life passing them by.

Eventually, Bella said, "You spoke of regret. I regret leaving you."

Edward's response was immediate. "I understand why you left."

"I was selfish and weak and—"

"But I understand. I can't imagine what it must have been like, watching me do the same things day after day…so close and yet so far."

"If the situations had been reversed," Bella said firmly, "you wouldn't have left me. You would have been my friend for as long as I had needed you."

Edward looked away. "I don't know if I would have been strong enough to be with you but not really have you. I don't know if I would have been strong enough to be sitting here with you right now and not be able to do this."

Edward stroked the back of her hand.

"Or this." He put his palm on her chest, assuring himself of her heart's beat.

"Or this." He kissed a single tear from her cheek.

"Oh Edward," Bella choked out, "I'm so very sorry that I wasn't strong enough. I don't know if I'm strong enough now. I can't lose you now… I can't. I just got you. I—"

"Hey," he said, but Bella didn't look up. If she moved, if she disrupted the delicate balance she was somehow maintaining, more tears might spill out and over. _She_ might spill over.

Edward touched under her chin carefully, guiding her back from the edge, guiding her back to him.

"Hey," he repeated. "If you think I'm so strong, then let me be strong. I'm going to fight this. We're going to fight this. It's not over yet. Not by a long shot."

Edward almost told Bella of Alice's plan. He almost told Bella that Alice could see the future, and that the future she saw was bright indeed.

But he didn't.

He didn't because he was smart enough to know that, to a normal, rational person, his conversation with Alice would seem completely crazy. Normal, rational human beings did not think they could see the future. Normal, rational human beings did not think they could read minds.

He himself was probably crazy. Hearing voices in your head was never a good sign. Hearing voices was a trademark of crazy. After all, he couldn't hear any voices in Bella's head.

So Edward didn't tell Bella of Alice's plan. He didn't tell Bella that he could hear pedestrians down the street thinking about food and money and deeper, darker things from which his mind recoiled. Instead, he pulled Bella to him, as close as she could possibly get, and stroked comfort into her hair while they waited for the next bus, the one that they were finally ready to take.

* * *

They disembarked on their corner. The bus they had chosen had been empty except for the driver and an old lady in the back who was asleep. Although Edward could still hear the weary mental grumbles of the driver and the surreal dreams of the lady, the voices grew quieter if he concentrated. If he concentrated on Bella, the other voices seemed to go away. He could almost make the other voices go away. Bella's mind was quiet; the only voice he could hear from her was the one that came out of her mouth.

So he kept her talking. He focused on making that mouth talk, making that mouth smile, making that mouth laugh. He focused on making her skin blush by telling her how last night had made him feel.

Edward looked forward to spending another night in Bella's bed. One more night, and then he would probably have to start spending his days and nights at the lab, helping Alice. If Alice was right, if Alice wasn't crazy after all, then Dr. Jenks and his team needed all the help they could get—help that only he could give.

They were walking down the familiar path toward home. The abating storm had run a cleansing hand over the city; the sky had never seemed so blue, Bella's eyes never so brown. Her face was tinged with embarrassment at some promise he had whispered in her ear—she was beyond pretty in pink.

But then, amid this kaleidoscope of colors, his vision snagged on something glinting wicked and red. He looked away from Bella's face for a moment to see a woman sitting daintily at a coffee shop table for two. Red ringlets of hair tumbled around her shoulders like coiled snakes.

He stopped abruptly, feeling an unsettling sense of déjà vu. He'd seen this hair before, through Alice's mind's eye. It was the same hair.

It was too soon.

"What is it?" Bella asked, for Edward was frozen, watching the lady sip her cappuccino. She slowly put the cup down and turned to look directly into his eyes. She had been expecting him.

Edward's vision blurred red, as if dripping with blood.

"Bella, we need to…" _Get home_, he had been about to say. But he stopped short as someone stepped directly into their path, the path that led to home.

It was a man.

It was a man Edward recognized.

And this man, he had a knife.


	21. Cold

Nothing good ever happens in an alley. Alleys are nothing but the forgotten interstices between buildings, conduits for trash, for a quick smoke, for other illicit activities. Alleys are where miscreants run to escape police, where drunks relieve themselves, where criminals herd their prey.

The man with the knife herded Edward and Bella into an alley, gesturing with his knife as though it were a whip. The redhead followed them, having successfully completed her task of being lookout and bait.

This alley was so close to civilization and safety, but Edward knew that it would be too far. They were two blocks from Emmett one way and three blocks from Jasper the other. They were a few yards from pedestrians hurrying home at the end of a long day. Yet Edward knew that no one's head would turn in their direction. No one had noticed the knife. No one ever stopped to look at what happened down a dark alley.

The knife glinted, scattering what remained of the light of day. It was a short, cruel knife, stubby yet sharp wrapped in the man's grubby hands.

Edward knew that this was the moment Alice had seen. This was the man Alice had shown him. This was the time Alice needed him to run, farther and faster than he ever had before.

There was only one problem.

Alice hadn't shown him Bella.

Alice's murky thoughts had shown him glimpses of a knife and a deserted brick alley and him running to safety. But Alice hadn't shown him Bella. She had known Bella would be here this day. She had known—she had _seen _it—but she had hidden her thoughts from Edward.

Alice had wanted Bella to die.

Alice had wanted Edward to herself.

Alice didn't understand Edward at all.

Alice probably had not even seen Bella running, probably because Bella wouldn't run. He'd seen Bella try to run. It never ended well.

Sure enough, Bella made no move to run. Instead, her face wiped blank, and she raised her hands, palms forward and submissive. "Hey buddy," she said, "we'll give you our money, our watches, anything we have."

But Edward knew that the man didn't want their wallets. He didn't want their watches. Edward knew this because the man in question was a man he'd seen before, the day he and Jasper had played long and hard against a devil who went down to Georgia.

The man's name was James. James was not thinking about money or sex. Instead, he was thinking about revenge. Victoria had begged him to walk away, to forget it. Of course, tap-dancing for tourists had never been her dream; she'd humored him because she loved him. Yet she could never understand him, never understand why James had cared so much about a dream that had been stolen away by a mere kid.

Someone who hadn't even wanted to be King.

James had established a certain reputation on the streets, a reputation that Edward had singlehandedly blown to pieces. Adversaries who had been so afraid of James in the past scoffed that even a piddlehead could beat him.

Victoria begged him with her words and her lips to let it go, and James tried. He really did. He might have even been successful—until, of course, the money ran out. Because James' music could no longer sustain them, because no joint in the city would hire him, Victoria had begun putting those killer legs of hers to good use in front of a slightly different audience. Her nightly tips already doubled those they had made in front of the Fish Market. The tips, however, came at a cost—James burned with anger at the thought of other men leering at what was his.

He happened to be down at the Fish Market the day that a plain girl fell to her knees, the day that the usurper King played something new, something that this world had never heard.

And James was nearly blinded with rage at the unspeakable talent that had been handed to this nobody. He burned himself up at the thought of this King getting his happily ever after, something that no King before him had ever done. And in that moment, James knew what he had to do.

When the kid and his girl had gone home, James had followed. When the kid suddenly stopped coming home, James tracked him to the girl's place.

And now it was time.

This kid had taken from him the things that he desired most in the world—his music, his street credibility. So now James would take from Edward the things he desired most. First, he would break Edward's hands. Then, he would break Edward's heart.

In the space of a few seconds, Edward pulled all of this from James' head. A beat later, he realized that James didn't plan on answering Bella's question. He didn't even plan on giving her time to pull her wallet from her pocket.

Instead, James lunged toward her, quick as a cobra's strike.

Edward, however, was faster.

* * *

In a dark cocoon across the city, a black widow opened her eyes and sat up from her red satin nest.

"No!" she cried shrilly. This wasn't right. This wasn't what she'd seen. This wasn't what she'd made Edward promise.

Edward had promised that he wouldn't do anything reckless. He had promised that he would run fast. He had promised that he would run far.

But Edward wasn't running.

* * *

Edward saw the exact point where James planned to drive the knife deep into Bella's flesh, and his hands got there first.

Edward had never before raised a hand to defend himself, had only ever raised his fists to protect Bella against that man in her apartment so long ago. But James knew how to fight. James knew exactly how someone might defend against this particular knife thrust.

And because James knew, so did Edward. At least, he hoped he did.

Edward captured James' wrist with his just _so _and twisted. Instantly, the knife flew from limp fingers, skittering uselessly across the floor of the alley into a nearby puddle.

Edward was not crazy after all.

"Bella, run!" he commanded, not even looking back to see if she would comply. Instead, he focused all his energy on incapacitating James.

Much as he had attacked Jacob in Bella's apartment, Edward descended on James with wild abandon. Against Jacob, Edward's fists had been ineffectual. Against James, they were not. His fists were fueled by every ounce of his rising intelligence, his love and fear for Bella, and his newfound ability to pick moves and countermoves directly out of James' brain. He landed crushing blows on James' larynx, his zyphoid process, his kneecap.

It was almost over. Bella would be safe. Alice would be wrong.

But just as Edward was about to deliver the final strike that would render James unconscious, a word rang out.

"Stop!"

Edward had been so focused on James that he had discounted Victoria. He heard her now, heard the fear in her thoughts.

He whirled to see her holding Bella tightly, in an almost lover's embrace, gripping her hair so harshly that Bella's head was thrown back, throat milky white and working frantically to tell Edward that it was going to be okay.

He no longer thought it would.

"You hurt him, I will hurt her," Victoria said. Her voice and hand shook, but her thoughts were sure. She raised the knife to Bella's throat. If Edward hurt her mate, she would hurt his.

Edward took a step. Victoria gripped the knife. Bella hissed, and blood coalesced from a small red thread on her neck.

Edward stopped moving.

Behind him, James started chuckling, softly at first and then loudly in peals that echoed gleefully off the brick walls. Edward watched through Victoria's eyes as James rose ominously, spitting red.

Edward didn't move.

James skirted him warily and draped an arm around Bella, sandwiching her between him and Victoria, one happy family.

Edward didn't move.

"Oh Eddie Eddie Eddie," James sing-songed while mussing Bella's hair playfully, looking at her fondly, like a kid sister. Bella cringed and put a tentative finger on her throat.

Then James sobered, and his eyes flashed hate into Edward's. "You really shouldn't have done that."

Edward moved.

He had one second, one second in which Victoria still had the knife, one second before she handed it to James as casually as passing the salt.

For Edward, one second was not enough.

For James, it was.

This time, James was faster. He snatched the knife from Victoria's outstretched hand and pinned it against Bella's back. If he pushed just a little, it would slip between her third and fourth ribs.

Edward stopped as abruptly as if he'd been stabbed.

He stood only a few feet from Bella. Only a few feet, but they might as well have been oceans apart. He looked into her eyes and saw that she was afraid. Not for herself, but for him. For a moment, the alley was filled with nothing but harsh breathing and a red-stained smile.

"James," Edward said. "You don't have to do this. I can fix it. I don't even want to be King. We could have a new battle—the _real_ battle this time. You could win."

The former King didn't even respond. He was beyond responding. He was not even thinking, not really. He merely hated. Nothing that Edward could say could change anything. But Edward had to try.

"Please," he said.

"I beg you," he said.

"Kill _me_," he said.

And as he said these things, Edward's voice was shaking and his lips were shaking and his body was shaking all over, so violently that he almost couldn't stand.

Victoria laughed. She laughed because James told her that he was only going to play with the little piddlehead and his girlfriend, rough them up a bit, make them afraid. She laughed to see Edward beg, felt empowered by his fear.

She wouldn't be laughing for long. James had lied. James was going to do so much more than play with them. James liked to play games, yes.

This was no game.

"Not her," Edward whispered, but he was too late.

He knew when the knife first parted Bella's flesh. He knew because of James' thoughts. He knew because of the surprise and pain in Bella's eyes. And he knew because he felt his soul ripped right from his body.

In that moment, in the space between sleep and dream, he could hear her. Bella did not scream or cry out or even gasp. But Edward could hear her nonetheless, as though a wall had dropped, the floodgates had released.

Bella washed over him as completely as a surging tide.

He could _hear_ her.

He had always seen her beauty, but seeing her from the inside was divine. The inside only made her more beautiful. Inside, she wasn't thinking of herself, of the pain, of the blood. Instead, she was thinking of how the laugh lines of her father's face had deepened with age. How the forests of Forks had smelled after a rain. How she'd never know what cheeky name Jake would devise when he at last opened his garage. But even as her thoughts darted, hummingbird, through her past, present, future, there was one constant—Edward's smile.

James unsheathed the knife, and Bella fell.

Edward caught her.

He would always catch her.

"I…" she rasped out, as softly as leaves stirring on a forest floor. She couldn't finish that sentence. She would never finish that sentence.

But Edward could hear its ending in her thoughts.

_Love you_, she was thinking. _So much_.

He heard the words, but they were more than words. Her love for him shone like the sun above the waves and laughed like the seagulls and wrapped him in the fluffiest of white towels. She was thinking of the day that she had first seen him, the day their paths had first crossed. Unknowingly, she was giving him a final gift—her first memory of him.

And as she remembered, so did he, his memory unfurling and soaring at last.

He _remembered_.

He remembered that the first day he'd met Bella in a hallway of a school was not the first day he had met Bella at all. The first day he'd met Bella was the day she'd almost been hit by a bus.

In the beginning, all he had seen was a gleaming mass of tangled, shiny curls. When he was small, he'd always gotten his pudgy hands caught in Mama's caramel hair as she held him close to her face and blew raspberries on his cheek. While she was otherwise distracted, he'd put a lock in his mouth, wondering if it tasted as sweet as it looked, sputtering when the hair divided into insidious tendrils across his tongue. Mama would laugh and clutch at his hand as it moved unerringly back to another lock, another taste, a lesson perpetually unlearned.

His mama's friends would coo over the tow-headed little boy and would assure Elizabeth that he'd grow out of it.

But he never did.

Mama stopped laughing when he continued to reach for her hair when he was five, six. Her adorable little boy grew into an awkward youngling with untamed hair and dull eyes. Her friends stopped coming around, and she started slapping his hands away, her eyes burning with a sadness he didn't understand. Although her hair continued calling to him, Edward soon learned that answering the call meant pain, both from the increasingly physical response that stung his arms or his face and from the new emotion in her eyes that stung his heart.

[Edward heard James laughing from somewhere above him. But he didn't want to think about him. He only wanted to think about Bella.]

While the dark tresses in front of him that day had called to his trembling hands, he had buried them deep in his coat, hunching his shoulders into the wind. Although Mama wasn't here—he hadn't seen her in a long, long time—he stilled his hands in memory of that pain. He focused instead on his scuffed shoes and the line in the sidewalk that they edged up against. It stretched out forever in either direction, a wall separating him from the beautiful, delectable hair.

But then the wind shifted slightly from the north, and he smelled the wind through that hair—wet and dark and fruit—and a clenched fist escaped the confines of its pocket. In a surge of movement, he crossed the invisible line without looking back. He made his fingers soft like the wind, tracing a strand of the hair and marveling at how it melted under his touch. The city, the people, and the noise faded away. For a moment, there was nothing but the feel of cool silk between his fingertips.

Then someone knocked against the shoulder that the hair flowed over, and the screaming began.

[Someone was screaming in the alley, too.]

Metal squealed on metal, and an oncoming bus foghorned _wrong_ and _danger_ and _run_.

[Bella hadn't run. Not from a bus. Not in an alley.]

In a panic, Edward had tried to pull his hand back, but the hair snarled and snagged at his hand, preventing his escape. He was surrounded by accusing mouths and lips pressing in on him from every side, and his vision swam with the hate in his Mama's cold blue eyes. There was nowhere to run; demons pressed in on him from every side, pushing him into the path of the loud bus bearing down on him like his own personal devil.

So he reacted the only way he could—he yanked the hair toward him, away from the loud bus threatening to crush them both. It would have to come with him if he had any hope of getting out of this alive and with the least amount of pain. In his fright, he over compensated the movement and felt himself tumbling back across the line in the pavement, the hair following and cascading over his face like rain. The bus wheezed to a stop and sat like a pit bull straining against its harness.

Amid a babbling brook of voices, Edward looked down and saw the rich, dark hair was seeping from the pale face of a girl. She was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen.

She was the most beautiful girl he would ever see. This girl was lying before him now, her hair dazzling, face pale, eyes wide and wet. At the moment that he was remembering looking down into her eyes, she was remembering looking up into his.

And then her memories started going all soft around the edges and Edward could hardly see through his tears and he didn't even notice when James stepped over and began breaking his knuckles, one by one, because his pain?

It was nothing.

Nothing compared to what it could have been. Nothing compared to hers.

She was trying very hard not to think about the pain. She was thinking about how she had come to Seattle to find herself, and she had. She had found that she was the type of person who would, with the proper encouragement, extend her hand to a stranger. Who would give of herself, expecting nothing in return. Who, although she had run from pain the first time, had not made the same mistake twice.

Too late, someone passing by had finally noticed the screaming. Someone had finally noticed the blood. The passersby swarmed like ants to this alley anthill. Now other people were screaming. People were talking rapidly on their phones and gesturing and asking Edward if he needed help.

But Edward just sat and remained soft and warm for Bella, listening intently to this girl, the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. The only girl who had shown him love. The only girl he would ever love.

Abstractly, his brain noted that Victoria slipped away. He watched Emmett in his apron tackling James to the ground as he tried to slip away with her. And people were asking him if he were okay. People were asking if he were in shock.

But Edward wasn't in shock.

Edward was fully aware, fully awake. He was awake, but he might as well have been asleep. Before he was smart, before he knew what he was doing, he had saved her life by accident—mere serendipity. Now that he was smart, he would have made the same choice, and gladly. But all the smarts in the world hadn't been able to save her.

So he merely sat and told Bella he loved her again and again, as though those three words could somehow breathe life back into her lungs and bring blood back into her cheeks. His mouth said love and his eyes wept love and his broken fingers bled love into hers.

The last thing this girl felt was his arms around her. The last thing she saw was his smile. And the last thing she heard was him telling her that he loved her back.


	22. Epilogue

"Tragedy is more important than love. Out of all human events, it is tragedy alone that brings people out of their own petty desires and into awareness of other humans' suffering. Tragedy occurs in human lives so that we will learn to reach out and comfort others."

-C. S. Lewis

* * *

In the thrumming heart of the Emerald City, a young man of indeterminable age sits at the edge of the world and plays what he quaintly calls his "music maker."

Those who happen to walk by when he's not making music, when his swollen, gnarled hands are at rest and he gazes into something only he can see—they do not really see _him_. They see old sneakers with holes in the toes and a threadbare jacket and neglected hair hanging limply in empty eyes. They see that he's sitting far from the hub of the Fish Market, far from the prime location where they would go to hear _real _music.

Those who happen to walk by when his fingers are still, they keep walking. They feel passing pity or idle amusement or nothing at all. They walk on, not knowing that they are going to miss music that couldn't be more real—the magic that happens the moment his fingers start to dance.

But there are others.

Many others.

These others come for his magic. They travel from remote corners of the city and the country and the world, across land and sea, to hear this person perform. Most don't know his name, they don't know _him_, but they know his story. They know the tale of the Seattle street musician who plays a forever lullaby for the one he loved and lost.

They arrive, hearts and lungs racing, ready to be dazzled by a living legend.

They arrive at twilight.

For he begins to play only when the sun is gone, that time that is not quite dark yet not quite light. His twilight serenade is fitting because he himself is in limbo, locked forever as more than he was but less than he could have been.

He could have been smart.

He could have been famous.

He could have been king of the world.

But he isn't. He isn't because, the day after he'd walked away from an alley, he'd walked away from his life. He hadn't been able to save _her_, so he couldn't bear to save himself.

He allowed himself to regress. Yet unlike Alice, he did not lose everything that he had found. Unlike Alice, he did not die within a year of receiving the treatment. Science cannot explain why he lived while she did not. Of course, scientists had tried. They argued that his pre-existing condition was a mental disorder rather than an emotional one. They theorized that his second dose may have somehow stemmed the tide. Eventually, they concluded—as had many before them—that his life is nothing short of a miracle.

To him, his life will never feel like a miracle.

Although he retains his music, he also retains faint inklings of his former intelligence—like stray meteors across his mind's night sky—that allow him to glimpse some of what he has lost. Some things, he does not regret losing. He does not miss hearing words better left unsaid. He does not miss doctors and needles and white. He does not miss Alice.

But there is something—someone—he does miss.

Very much.

It has been one year since the alley, the place where people go to die. He's alive, but he hasn't felt alive. Time has blended days together in his mind like foliage in a passing forest. During the day, he shelves books he'll never read. On a beach, he searches for treasure he'll never find. Days repeat, repeat, and repeat again until they are all but forgotten.

But there are days that he will always remember—days filled with music and laughter and a simple girl with expressive eyes and an expansive soul. He will never forget those days. He will never forget that girl.

When she had been alive, she had been his sun, a beacon of hope in his pervasive darkness—bright and warm and life.

But all suns set.

Now that his sun is gone, he raises his face to the darkness and finds the brightest, most beautiful star sitting up above the world so high. His diamond in the midnight sky. He plays for her, his little star. He plays his best for her.

As he plays, he faces the water, his back to the world. He does not accept song requests or tips. He is rarely aware of his audience because he does not play for them. He plays for someone whom he may never see again.

Sometimes, he's visited by people he would recognize, were he to ever look past the stars in his eyes. Most often, it's a grizzly bear of a man in a stained apron, a man whose help had arrived too late.

Sometimes, a woman stands in the crowd, a toddler in her grip. Sometimes, the cook is also there, and he notices the striking resemblance between the Patrician profiles of the woman and the pianist. They share the same aquiline nose, the same strong jaw, the same sad eyes. Yet she never approaches her brother, never speaks to him, never requests that he acknowledge her presence.

She merely watches. She merely listens.

She understands.

"I'm sorry," she whispers as she walks away, her words carried off by the wind.

Today, a day that is exactly one year after a young life was snuffed out in an alley, a new man stands alone at the edge of the crowd. His mustache gone gray with grief, a father stands with bowed head and moist eyes and waits for the young pianist play his daughter's life. Although the pianist doesn't see this man, doesn't know why he's come, he does know what day it is.

Her lullaby is his grand finale, the reason why travelers set out on their pilgrimage to Seattle, the performance for which they wait with bated breath. Yet because the lullaby's muse is gone, because her own living, breathing lullaby never came to its natural conclusion, Edward never plays farther than a certain point in her song. It always cuts short—just like Bella's life.

Those who are fortunate enough to have heard the lullaby played fully—the only day it ever was—still remembered it.

"It was poetry, it was purity, it was the most beautiful thing this world has ever heard," they would say. "Such a pity that the world will never hear it again." Those lucky few will always remember hearing his music. They will always remember seeing his smile, that soft, shy smile that implied a secret shared.

He still smiles, but he smiles sorrow. His eyes when he smiles are like sagging windows on an abandoned house. He smiles his sadness when his fingers drift away from the final keys.

The haunting melody ends on an unresolved note that lingers in the air, forever hapless and homeless. His captive audience sits, rapt, hoping that the song has not ended, that the note will be resolved at last.

Yet they know in their hearts that the song is finished, that they will never hear the glorious finale to the love story that the young pianist has played. That they will never get their happily ever after.

When they sense that the music is over, they don't applaud, they don't cheer, they don't crowd around him to reach out and touch this person who has reached out and touched them. They remain quiet and lost and alone.

They came to be dazzled; they are instead destroyed.

Yet even in their despondency, even though the pianist has dragged them to the depths of despair, he has not abandoned them, has not cast them completely to the demons. For in the silence, there is not only destitution; there is redemption.

Redemption in the understanding that the lullabies of their lives remain unwritten. Their lullabies linger on, their melody ebbs and flows and grows. So they go home to their husbands and wives and children and touch them and kiss them and love them.

Through his music, he has forever immortalized his love. Through his music, he touches lives in ways that he will never see, in ways that he can no longer understand. Pulsing as slowly and steadily as blood in the vein, his sound ripples through people he will never meet, rejuvenating life after life, leaving small miracles in its wake.

But the young man knows nothing of these miracles. He knows nothing of life beyond his small sphere, his eighty-eight monochromatic keys, and his twinkling little star. He doesn't play for anyone else. The pulse of his music does not beat for them. His heart beats for Bella.

He plays only for Bella.

As he has always done.

Each night, Jasper collects him and shepherds him back to the place they now call home. When Edward no longer had his smarts, when Edward no longer had Bella, Edward needed a friend, one who wasn't impaired by booze and drugs. Jasper gave him that friend. He cleaned himself up, purchased a dilapidated yet roomy house on the outskirts of the city with the last of their King of the Hill tips, and began the painstaking process of shaping it into a home.

Each night, when Jasper clasps Edward's shoulder in a silent signal that it's time to go, Edward lowers his hands, raises his face to the stars peeking through the cracks in the heavens, and asks a single question.

"Will Miss Bella hear this music?"

Each night, Jasper answers honestly, "I think she will, kid. I think she will."

And somehow, somewhere, she does.

- Fin -

* * *

**Final note: **

Five publishers initially rejected _Flowers for Algernon_ in 1965 because of its unhappy ending (in which, by the way, Charlie does not die). Editors wanted Charlie to maintain his intelligence, marry Miss Kinnian, and live happily ever after. Believing in his vision, author Daniel Keyes refused to change the ending, even going so far as to return a cash advance that he'd been given.

Today, the work has sold over 5 million copies and has become a tale that school children everywhere often read and remember well into their adult years. Many who reviewed this fic told me that they remember _Flowers for Algernon_ because it made them cry. Many who reviewed also told me that they couldn't continue reading past Chapter 3 (the chapter in which this story's inspiration is revealed) for that very reason. Therefore, if you've read to this point, thank you so much for taking the journey despite your fear of the destination. This was the hardest thing I've ever written; it's so rewarding knowing that it was actually read.

Thanks to moonlightdreamer333, CapriciousC, WouldYouLookAtThat, wickedcicada, and my real life ninja, Shannon, for pre-reading/editing. You each contributed your own invaluable nuances that helped make this fic the best it could be.

Stay awesome, Twific readers.


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